


DUKE UNIVERSITY 


DIVINITY SCHOOL 
LIBRARY 





GIFT OF 











Orford Church Cert Books 


An Elementary History 
of the Church in Great - Britain 


BY 


THE Rev. WILLIAM HOLDEN HUTTON, B.D. 


FELLOW AND TUTOR OF S. JOHN’S COLLEGE, OXFORD 
EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP OF ELY 


SECOND EDITION 


NEW YORK 
EDWIN S. GORHAM 
CHURCH MISSIONS HOUSE, FOURTH AVENUE, AND 22ND STREET 


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mv. S, 
Soe ete 
HIUSS EF 


CONTENTS 

cHap. PAGE 
1. The Church in Britain, . = : ? 3 1 
u. The Early English Church, . : : ; 4 
mi. The Medieval Church, . 5 F : = P19 
tv. The Reformation, . F : - ‘ sate 
v. The Church under the Stewarts, . ‘ - 62 
vit. The Eighteenth Century, : : : anys) 
vu. The Nineteenth Century, : - E - 82 
GLossaRY, . ; - ; ; : : . 90 
CuronotocicaL TaBLr, . : = ’ : «O94 
INDEX, « . ? : ; : - j IE 


601439 









AN ELEMENTARY HISTORY 
_OF THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


CHAPTER I 
THE CHURCH IN BRITAIN 


Tue Divine Society which our Lord Jesus Christ founded 
to be the perpetual embodiment on earth of His Divine 
Purpose and the channel of His Divine Grace, found 
ready to its hand the expansive power of the world 
empire of Rome. As birds carry the seeds to fresh 
garden ground, so the Roman civilisation spread the 
Gospel of the Son of God. We do not know when the 
first Christians Janded in Britain, or when the Church 
first sent its missionaries or set up its organisation. 
Probably Christianity came first with some converted soldier, 
or some rich provincial who sojourned in Britain. Probably 
it came directly from Gaul, indirectly from Rome. There 
is no sign of Eastern origin about our National Church. 

Of any Apostolic mission we have no trace. It was 
suggested in early times that S. Paul preached to the 
Britons: S. Peter, too, has been named as a preacher in 
our land, and an old legend tells that Joseph of Arimathea 
came to Glastonbury and planted the holy thorn. But 
these, if they are not impossible, are tales for which we 
have no credible warranty. For all we know, the 
Catholic faith was like the grain of mustard seed of a 
chance planting, yet it grew in Britain till the birds of 
the air took shelter under its branches. 

Almost certainly there was no church organisation in 


Britain before a 4 x » naming all the 
Lane | 


2 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


churches of the West, makes no reference to our land. 
Thirty-two years later Tertullian makes direct mention 
of ‘districts of the Britons’ as ‘subjugated to Christ’ ; 
and about thirty years later still Origen speaks of Britain 
as one of the distant regions whither the Gospel had 
spread. In the fourth century we have direct evidences of 
the existence of the Church. ‘The first is a story of which, 
though we do not hear it till nearly a hundred years 
afterwards, it is difficult to doubt the substantial truth. 
A Roman soldier named Alban learned to serve Christ 
from the beautiful life of a persecuted Christian priest, 
and he gave his life for his faith at Verulamium (now 
known by his own name, 8S. Alban’s) within the first - 
decade of the fourth century. 

More direct than this is the evidence of the assent of 
British bishops to the councils of Arles 314, Nicwa 325, 
Sardica 343, Ariminum 359. Scanty memorials, too, 
with Christian emblems scattered over the land, prove 
the existence of a small Christian population, chiefly 
among the poorer classes; and there are remains of a 
fourth-century Christian church at Silchester, and 
possibly also at Canterbury. It is plain that Christianity 
had spread into Wales before the departure of the Romans ; 
and we may believe the Church, though it was not 
strong, to have been firmly rooted before the great 
storm of heathen invasion burst over the land. 

The British Church was Catholic: that is, it agreed in 
all essentials with the Holy Church throughout all the 
world. It worshipped One God in Trinity and Trinity in 
Unity. It had the Apostolic ministry of bishops, priests, 
and deacons. Pagan survivals there were, no doubt, as 
indeed there still are; but the religion of the Christians 
was not semi-druidical, but, as 8. Athanasius declared in 
363, loyal to the Catholic faith. In the fifth centu 
S. Patrick, the great missionary to Ireland, in the sixt 
Gildas, the first of our national historians, were writers 
untainted by heathenism or heresy. 

But at the very time of the withdrawal of the Roman 
legions, false teaching began to perplex and divide the 
Church. Pelagius, a Briton, whom 8. Jerome calls ‘a 
great fat dog of Albion,’ began to teach against the 


THE CHURCH IN BRITAIN 3 


Christian doctrine of original sin. He did not himself 
teach in Britain, but his doctrine was spread by one 
Agricola. The British clergy appealed to the Church 
of Gaul to resist the error, and two bishops, S. Germanus 
of Auxerre and S. Lupus of Troyes, were sent in 429 to 
help the small Church now struggling with heresy. They 
preached ‘ in churches, in streets, in the country and the 
byways,’ and when a Saxon band of pirates joined the 
northern Picts in an attack on the Britons, Germanus, 
on Easter Day 430, led the Christians to victory, won 
without bloodshed by the panic into which the pagans 
fell when they heard the Easter shouts of Alleluia echo 
from hill to hill. S. Germanus visited Britain a second 
time in 447, and completed the destruction of Pelagianism. 
He left behind him a cherished memory, particularly in 
the West, where many churches are called by his name. 

Christianity was not restricted to the South of Britain. 

Before this it is said that S. Patrick had gone, probably 
from near Dumbarton, to convert the Irish, and Palladius, 
who had probably been with S. Germanus, went on a 
mission to the same folk. About 390 S. Ninian, himself 
a Briton who had studied at Rome, went back to what 
was very likely his own land of North Britain, and 
preached the Gospel to the heathen Picts of Galloway. 
Thus, before the great change of the fifth century, there 
was in Britain a branch of the Catholic Church, not 
strong, but yet national, and affecting both branches of 
the Celtic race—the Bry thons, who were largely Roman- 
ised, and the Goidels, who retained their old tribal life 
but little impaired. This Church was in close connection 
with the Church in Gaul. It had relations with Rome, 
less close by far, but relations of respect towards the 
first see of the West, where the tombs of S. Peter and 
S. Paul were the objects of reverence to the Christian 
world. It had relations too with the East, with the 
great Church of Constantinople, the imperial city where 
lived the Czsar to whose sway Britain, so long at least 
as his legions remained, was subject. 

Thus stood the Church when the English came to 
Britain. 


CHAPTER II 
THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH 


Tue conquering English swept over the land, and Chris- 
tianity died under the devastating wave. Only i in a few 
isolated districts of the country, which came to be ealled 
England, did it linger, and among the Goidels and the 
Brythons of Wales and of Devon and Cornwall, and in 
Strathclyde (the district from the Firth of Clyde to the 
Derwent, and between Derwent and Dee). There the 
Celtic Church survived, marred by many grievous errors 
of practice, and unwilling, or too weak, to influence the 
Teutonic conquerors, but rich in saints and in missions, 
and in close connection over sea with the Churches of the 
Irish and the Bretons. Bangor and S. Asaph’s, still 
cathedral cities, were already famous, and S. David, who 
founded the see which bears his name, lived in the ‘sixth 
century. It was for the Celts an age of saints, but it was 
an age also of conflict and sin. Gildas, the British monk, 
sternly condemns the vices of his people. Cornwall, or 
West Wales, as it came to be called, was soon split off 
from its northern kin, and Cumbria was eut off from 
Wales, and the three divisions of the Celtic Christians 
had to go their ways separately. But the Celts could 
still put forth missions. In 563 8, Columba came from 
Ireland, trained by a pupil of S. David, and thus associ- 
ated with Welsh traditions, to settle at Iona with a colony 
of monks; and ten years later S. Columbanus with his 
followers spread the Gospel over vast tracts of the con- 
tinent of Europe, among Franks, Burgundians, and 
Lombards. 

In 597 came the mission which was to convert the 
heathen conquerors of Britain and to make England a 

4 


THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH 5 


Christian land. ®thelberht, king of Kent, had a Chris- 
tian wife from Gaul, and she had with her a Christian 
bishop. Englishmen were seen at Constantinople in the 
Cesar’s court; and S. Gregory, even before he became 
Pope, planned the conversion of the barbarians. One 
day, the story runs, he saw in the slave-market at Rome 
some fair-haired lads, and was told that they were 
‘Angles,’ and that their king Ailla ruled over the land 
called Deira (that is now Yorkshire). ‘Not Angles, but 
Angels,’ he said, and he prayed that they might be 
brought de ira (out of wrath) to sing ‘ Alleluia’ to God. 
When he became pope he sent missionaries, and in 597, 
between Easter and Pentecost, they landed in the isle of 
Thanet, most probably at Richborough, some forty men 
with Augustine at their head, the true founder of the 
English Church. Singing litanies, they approached the 
king and his wise men, by whom they were kindly greeted, 
and before long they settled in Canterbury, where the 
king gave them the ancient church of S. Martin, which 
was then still standing and even now remains. On 
Whitsun Eve, June 1, 597, King Aithelberht was bap- 
tized, and Christianity began to be the favoured religion. 
No man was compelled to enter the Church, but the king ~ 
‘treated believers with a closer affection, as fellow-citizens 
with him in the kingdom of heaven.’ 

S. Augustine was consecrated by Vergilius, bishop of 
Arles, to be archbishop for the English folk ; and when 
help and advice were needed, the pope sent him more 
men and much wise counsel. He worked among the 
English for seven years, and when he died on May 26, 
604, he had accomplished a great work, whose effects last 
till to-day. He consecrated two more bishops, Mellitus 
for Essex and London, Justus for Kent and Rochester. 
He met the bishops of the West Welsh near Cricklade 
(probably ‘the Oak’ at Down Ampney), and found that 
they would not join with him; and the two Churches 
went on side by side for centuries, till at last the British 
Church was merged in the Church of England. Gradu- 
ally Celtic customs yielded to those of the West, and 
political changes caused the see of Canterbury to spread 
its protecting hands over the Welsh and Cornish 


6 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


bishoprics. From the tenth century the latter, and from 
the thirteenth the former, have been ecclesiastically sub- 
ject to the primate of ali England. 

As the years went on Christianity spread among the 
English, among the East Anglians, and in the Midlands, 
and maintained its hold, though with difficulty, in Kent. 
In 625, when Eadwine, king of Northumberland, took a 
wife from Kent, her chaplain, the bishop Paulinus, was 
able to spread the faith among the men of Yorkshire. 
At Goodmanham, in Yorkshire, the Northumbrian wise 
men accepted Christianity. Life, said a thane, was to 
them in their heathen days as a sparrow that flies through 
the lighted hall; only the Church of Christ could tell 
whence it came and whither it went. Eadwine was a 
great king to whom the Brythons of Strathclyde had 
bowed, and he bore a title which showed his rule over 
the Celtic races. ‘The Church spread more rapidly under 
his protection than in any other part of the land, and 
though when he died Paulinus had to fly to the south to 
save the widowed queen from a new heathen power, his 
work among the Yorkshire dales and moors and over the 
plains of Lincolnshire was never wiped out. The minsters 
of Lincoln and York remain to remind us of the founder 
of their Christian life. 

But the work of faith in the north owed much to 
another source. Oswald, king of Northumbria, a Chris- 
tian and a saint, won back the kingdom from the heathens, 
and having himself found shelter at Iona, he looked 
thither for help to revive the Church which had suffered 
from the heathen sway. Only ten years had passed since 
Paulinus had begun the mission: in 635 8. Aidan, con- 
secrated by the Celtic bishops at Iona, came to revive and 
confirm the work. He settled at Lindisfarne, the ‘ Holy 
Island’ near where, in the rock fortress of Bamborough, 
dwelt the Northumbrian king, and from thence king 
and bishop went out over the land in their fellow-work. 
Churches were built, and schools and monasteries set up, 
and the beautiful life of S. Aidan, ‘a man of the utmost 
gentleness, piety, and moderation,’ led men to follow him 
gladly in the way. 

Christianity was spreading everywhere. In 634 Birinus 


THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH 7 


came to Wessex and was bishop of Dorchester near 
Oxford ; and before many years Cedd was sent by Oswiu 
the Northumbrian king to work among the East Saxons, 
and Chad in the Midlands. The south of what came to 
be called Scotland was joined to the Church of North- 
umbria. Thence came S. Cuthbert, and the days of his 
youth were the days also of the two Northumbrian nobles 
who lived to do great service to the Church: Benedict 
Biscop, priest, artist, and musician, whose work still 
remains at Monk Wearmouth, and Wilfrith, who settled 
in 661 at Ripon. In 664 the two branches of the English 
Church met, by the wish of King Oswiu, in the monastery 
of Whitby, to settle their differences. Those who owed 
their faith to the Scottish missionaries still followed the 
Celtic customs, as to reckoning Easter, as to the tonsure, 
and in other matters. Wilfrith and the stronger section 
looked across the sea to the usage of the ‘ Catholic Church 
dispersed throughout the world.’ The synod decided in 
favour of the latter, many of the Celtic clergy at once 
accepted the decision, and the final unity of the English 
Church from that day was certain. 

To the missionary zeal of the Scots we owe much, and 
the northern and midland shires will never forget the 
names of S. Aidan and 8. Chad. But Celtic Christianity 
was fitted rather to evangelise than to build up. With 
the unity of the English Church came an organisation, 
helped by association with the Universal Church, which 
strengthened what had been begun, and spread the 
Gospel where it had not yet penetrated. The synod of 
Whitby completed what S. Augustine had begun. He had 
come to convert the English. . In 664 the English recog- 
nised their union with the Catholic Church. 

After the synod of Whitby, when the guidance of the 
Church in Britain passed into the hands of the priests 
who followed the customs of Western Christendom, 
Colman, the abbat of Lindisfarne, went back to Iona, 
whence the mission of the Scots had come, and thence to 
Ireland. The monasteries of North England were still 
ruled by men trained among the Scots, but they accepted 
the usages of the South. The Northern mission had done 
its work. It had planted the Church in the affections 


8 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


of the people, and it had taught, through monasticism, 
the simple virtues of the Christian life. The English 
historian, devoted in his attachment to the Catholic 
uses of the West, bears the noblest testimony to the 
saintliness of Colman and his companions. ‘ How great 
was his simplicity,’ says Bede, ‘how great his self- 
restraint, the very place which they governed shows for 
himself and his predecessors, for at their departing there 
were found very few houses besides the Church ; indeed, 
no more than were barely sufficient for their daily life. 
They had no money, but only cattle; for if they received 
any money from rich persons, they immediately gave it 
to the poor: there being no need to gather money or — 
provide‘houses for the entertainment of the great men of 
the world ; for such never resorted to the Church, except 
to pray and hear the word of God. The king himself, 
when opportunity was, would come only with five or six 
thegns and depart when prayer in the church was over. 
But if they happened to take a repast there, they were 
satisfied with the plain and daily food of the brethren, 
and needed no more; for the whole care of those teache 
was to serve God, not the world.’ 7 
The unity of the Church in Britain was now shown by 
the fact that Wilfrith, the great advocate at Whitby of 
the Catholic claims, was nominated to be bishop among 
the Northumbrians, and Chad, now abbat of Lastingham, 
who belonged to the Scottish mission, was sent by Oswiu 
to Canterbury to be consecrated bishop of York. Two 
British bishops, probably Cornish, joined in the laying 
on of hands. Wilfrith was consecrated in Gaul, at Com- 
pi¢gne, by twelve bishops, one of whom was Agilbert, 
who had been bishop in Wessex. When he returned to 
England in 666, his master, King Alchfrith, was dead, and 
for some time no diocese was placed under his rule. He 
resided quietly at Ripon, acting as bishop sometimes 
among the Mercians, while Chad, ‘a most religious 
servant of God and an admirable teacher,’ governed the 
Northern Church for three years. Then, when Chad 
retired to Lindisfarne, whence he moyed in 669 to be 
bishop of the Mercians at Lichfield, Wilfrith became 
bishop for the whole province of the Northumbrians, 


THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH 9 


The English Church was now to receive its second 
great impulse from Rome. In 668, at the request of the 
Northumbrian and Kentish kings, Pope Vitalian chose 
and consecrated Theodore of Tarsus, a monk of sixty-six 
years, to be archbishop of Canterbury. He was the first 
archbishop of Canterbury consecrated by the pope, and 
after him there was no other so consecrated for five 
hundred years. 

Theodore’s first work was to visit all England, and 
to him we are told all the Churches yielded a ready 
obedience. Then came years of peace and quiet growth. 
The people were taught, and everywhere stone churches, 
magnificent beside the simple wooden buildings then 
chiefly seen in the north, were set up. Wilfrith began 
the building of York Minster, and Hexham, Jarrow, 
Ripon. Monk Wearmouth still contains remains of his 
day. Theodore in 673 held the first council of the Church 
of the English, ‘the precursor of the present convocations 
of the clergy of the provinces of Canterbury and York.’ 
The archbishop had been sent to England from Rome, 
but in the canons this council set forth there is not 
the slightest reference to Roman authority or Roman 
example. In 680 a second council was held at Hatfield, 
which declared its belief in the complete doctrine of the 
Holy Trinity and its acceptance of the five general 
councils. Ten years later the first great archbishop of 
the English died, after ruling for twenty-two years. In 
his time the English bishoprics grew from seven to 
seventeen, and the dioceses remained much as he left 
them till Henry vim. added more. He brought to the 
English a new influence which neither Augustine nor 
Aidan had given—the influence of the Eastern Church ; 
and he began the great schools which made the English 
the most learned among the Churches of Europe. His 
work was to set the English free to rule their own Church. 
‘Before this,’ says the great English chronicle, ‘the 
bishops had been Romanish: henceforth they were 
English.’ 

The last years of Theodore had seen a strife with that 
bishop of the English who was most distinctly ‘Romanish.’ 
Wilfrith in 678 was expelled from his see, most likely 


10 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


because of some quarrel with the northern king Ecgfrith 
about the property given to his see. He went to Rome, 
and a synod there ordered that he should be restored. 
But of this neither the English Church nor the king 
took any heed, and when he came again to the north he 
was imprisoned. Released after nine months, he went ~ 
to convert the South Saxons, of whose barbarism he had 
had earlier experience; and then, when after five years 
Ecgfrith was slain in distant warfare with the Picts, he 
was restored to York, Hexham, and the monastery of 
Ripon. Again in 691 he was expelled, and for fourteen 
years he was deprived of his see. Restored in 705 to the 
bishopric of Hexham only, he retained it till his death — 
in 709. His long career is a proof of the sturdy in- 
dependence of the English Churchmen, both clerical and 
lay, and their indifference to papal orders and threats. 
Partly by the keen interest which all folk, high and 
low, took in religious matters, and which was seen so 
clearly in their determination to settle its own affairs, 
but more by the holy lives of many of its sons and 
daughters, the Church in Britain grew during these 
years, we may believe, in favour with God and man. 
Ecgfrith’s dominions stretched northwards to include the 
south-west of what is now called Scotland, and in his day 
was set up the great cross at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire, 
on which may still be read Caedmon’s dream of the Holy 
Rood. ‘The names of Oswald and Oswiu remind us that 
holiness was not confined to the cloister, but yet it is 
among the professed religious that we find in Cuthbert, 
Hilda, and Adilthryd the most beautiful examples of 
the consecrated life. The third of these, Hdilthryd (St. 
Etheldreda), was married first to an ealdorman among the 
East Angles, and then to Ecgfrith of Northumbria, but 
remained always vowed to God. She received the veil 
from Wilfrith, and at length obtained leave from her 
husband to ‘lay aside worldly cares and serve only the 
true King, Christ.’ Then she went to Ely, where her 
first husband had given her lands, and built a house, 
over which she ruled as abbess ‘by works and example 
of a heavenly life, the virgin mother of very many virgins 
consecrated to God.’ She died in 679. More famous 


THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH 11 


still was S. Hilda, who was converted by Paulinus, and 
was given by S. Aidan land to found a monastery by the 
Wear, from which she moved to Streaneshalch (Whitby) 
in 658. Here she ruled over both monks and nuns. 
Five bishops came from her fold, and the first poet of 
English race, Caedmon, who told the tale of the Creation 
and Redemption in verse. Hilda was sought by kings 
and wise men from all parts, and her advice was received 
as an oracle of God. Under her care the Scriptures were 
studied, and the Apostolic example of poverty and self- 
denial was ever followed, and her house became the most 
famous in the northern lands. 

Cuthbert, abbat of Melrose and of Lindisfarne, and 
from 685 bishop of the latter place, lived till 687 as the 
brightest example of the piety, active as well as con- 
templative, which the Scottish mission had produced. 
As a preacher he was ‘clear and plain, full of dignity 
and gentleness.” He was ‘great in humility, glorious 
in the reality of his faith and the ardour of his charity,’ 
lowly of heart, sweet of voice, with his mind ever fixed 
on heavenly things. He ministered among the poorest 
and in the wildest districts of the land, that was scarcely 
yet reclaimed by man. ‘Through his prayers and. by his 
hands the sick readily received healing, by faith in Jesus 
Christ. Above all, he had the best qualification of a 
teacher, says Bede, ‘for whenever he bade any one do 
a thing, he showed the way by doing it himself.’ Years 
after his death he came to be the patron saint of the 
great see of Durham, where the splendid cathedral rose 
over his bones, to be the perpetual memorial of his name, 
to the honour and praise of God. 

In such men and women as these of whom we have 
told, Theodore, Cuthbert, Wilfrith, Chad, Etheldreda, 
and Hilda, the world saw very diverse talents and powers 
offered in service to God. By their struggles, though 
they were not always rightful, and by their humble 
saintly deaths, the Church grew in the thoughts and in 
the hearts of the tribes that dwelt between the Tay and 
the English Channel. ‘The death of Wilfrith ends the 
era of great men as well as the age of the first organisa- 
tion of our Church. With the eighth century it stood 


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12 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


forth as the superior of the kingdoms which its influence 
helped to combine in one. . 

The years that followed the death of Wilfrith saw the 
organisation of the Church in England in slow but sure 
progress. Kings were her nursing fathers, queens her 
nursing mothers. In the courts and in the monasteries 
religion was fostered; and while the kings helped the 
monks, the monks helped the State by the Pree: at of 
sound learning, the arts and agriculture, as well as of 
true religion. England was being gradually divided into 
parishes. The dioceses were so large that the bishops 
were not able even once a year to visit every part of 
them, and it was their aim, says Bede, to ordain priests 
and appoint teachers who in every village should preach 
the Word of God, and.consecrate the heavenly mysteries, 
and above all perform the office of holy baptism when 
opportunity should occur. The monasteries were often 
‘a great help to the parish clergy and the bishops. From 
them came the missionaries, such as 8. Willibrod, arch- 
bishop of Utrecht, and S. Winfrid (Boniface), archbishop 
of Mainz, who made England famous in the conversion 
of the north German barbarians. From them came the 
bishops, many of them kinsmen of the kings, such as 
Ecgberht, first archbishop of York, 735, the brother of 
Eadberht, king of Northumbria, and Alcuin, the most 
learned man of the age, the adviser of the Emperor 
Charles the Great. And from them came the histories 
which tell us nearly all we know of our forefathers in 
those distant days. 

The first and greatest historian of the English is the 
Venerable Bede. He was born about 672 and died in 735, 
and nearly all his life was spent in the monastery of 
Jarrow, which with that of Wearmouth was founded by 
Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian noble and monk, who 
did much for the civilisation of the north in 674. His 
history he gathered ‘either from ancient documents, or 
from the tradition of the elders, or from my own know- 
ledge’: and to it we owe nearly all that we know of the 
beautiful lives of Cuthbert and Aidan and Hilda, of the 
wisdom of Theodore and the enthusiasm of Wilfrith, and 
of the dark days of danger and sin through which the 


THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH 13 


Church came at last to her high heritage. From 
him we learn how important it was that the Scottish 
missionaries should yield to the unity of Christendom, 
and at the same time how great is our debt to the saintly 
lives of the leaders of the Northern Church. 

Bede was everywhere honoured, and his advice was 
souglit by all, from the highest ecclesiastic to the poorest 
scholar. He died while he was completing the transla- 
tion which should enable Englishmen to read the Gospels 
in their own tongue ; and when the last words of S. 
John’s Gospel were written, his soul passed to Paradise, 
with ‘Glory to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost’ on his lips. 

Bede died when the Church appeared to have fallen 
from her first love. For the next century it seems as 
though everywhere there was sloth and decay. The 
overlordship of England had passed from the North- 
umbrian kings to those of the Mid-English, and they 
had none of the zeal for righteousness which had belonged 
to Oswald and Oswiu. 8S. Winfrid from Germany, as 
well as popes from Rome, wrote to reproach the kings 
for their evil lives, and prelates for their slackness in 
enforcing the discipline of the Church. In 747, ata 
council at Cloveshoo, Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury 
and his suffragans tried to reform the abuses which 
disgraced the people and the priests. Offa, the Mercian 
king, thought to mend matters by setting up a new 
archbishopric in 787, but it lasted only sixteen years ; 
and when the West Saxon king Ecgberht became over- 
lord of all the tribes, the archbishop of Canterbury was 
finally recognised to be the primate of all England. 
Nothing stirred the Church from her slumber till the 
coming of a new heathen horde. 

In Wales, during these years, the church of the Brythons 
had continued to hold aloof from the English. ‘Up to 
this day,’ says Bede, ‘it is the habit of the Brythons to 
esteem the faith and religion of the English as a thing 
of nought, and to hold no more communication with 
them than with pagans,’ and the British priests beyond 
the Severn Strait would give to Englishmen neither 
greeting nor kiss of peace. Now came the age of 
approximation. It is clear that in Bede’s time the Welsh 


nt 


14 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


Church was quite independent of Rome, but within the 
eighth century Wales accepted the Western rules about 
Easter and the tonsure, to which the Scottish mission 
had submitted after the synod ot Whitby a century 
before. 

From the time of Elbod, bishop of Bangor, who died 
in 809, the Churches of Wales and England ceased to 
be hostile, and when King Alfred’s rule spread over 
‘the southern part of Britain [i.e. of Wales]’ they 
began to blend together in unity of mission as wel] as 
of faith. . 

Beyond Northumbria the missionaries from Iona had 
spread the light of the Gospel into the northern regions 
of Ross, Cromarty, Sutherland, and Caithness, but there 
was as yet no parochial system, and priests were scattered 
scantily over the land. When Kenneth, who united in 
himself the blood of the Picts and the Scots, came to 
rule the land, he established the ecclesiastical primacy 
at Dunkeld. Iona, exposed to the ravages of the pirate 
Norsemen, ceased to be the centre of Church life, and a 
new order of monks, called in Goidelic Culdees (servants 
of God), became the chief representatives of the Celtic 
Church. Their life was much less strict than that of the 
regular monks. They married, and their abbats had much 
secular power: but they had little of the missionary zeal 
of the sons of Iona, and when the monastic revival at 
length spread northwards, they became organised under 
the same rules as the secular canons. 

In the middle of the ninth century Christianity had 
extended over nearly all Great Britain ; and though the 
Churches of the English, of the Brythons, and of the 
Goidels recognised no common superior either within 
the island or without, they had a plainly visible unity 
in faith and doctrine. Lack of learning, now deplorably 
conspicuous, tended to keep the priests and bishops in 
isolation. Something was to be done to revive zeal by 
the fearful devastations of the Danish invasion. 

Less than sixty years after Bede’s death the reforma- 
tion that he had earnestly desired came through the 
sword of the heathen invader. In 794 his own monastery 
was sacked by the Danes, and within fifty years they 


THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH 15 


conquered all the north and a great part of the south 
of England. Everywhere monasteries perished and 
churches fell before their attack; and martyrdoms 
‘or the name of Christ were constant. Edmund, king 
of the East Anglians, suffered for his faith in 870. 
Centuries later the abbey and town of Bury S. Edmunds 
rose to commemorate him near where he laid down his 
life. It was a century of persecution and of darkness. 
One of the few events favourable to the Church was the 
recognition by the West Saxon king #thelwulf in 855 
of the duty of paying tithes. 

Light comes again with the good King Alfred the Great, 
who held out in Wessex against the Danes. He won 
peace for his land, surrendering in 878 the north and 
half the Midlands to their king, Guthrum, who became 
a Christian. Alfred was a saint as well as a statesman 
and warrior. He taught his people by his translation of 
pious books, he trained learned clergy, and he set the 
example of a strict and holy life. He revised the laws of 
the English, setting in the forefront the ten command- 
ments. Under him the Welsh Church came closer to 
the English; and his successors remained firm sons of 
the Church. The next great name is that of Archbishop 
Dunstan, the first of the ecclesiastical statesmen who did 
so much in the Middle Ages to make England great. 
From 940 to 988 he exercised a commanding influence on 
English history. His vigorous administration kept off 
the Danes. His laws taught the State to organise the 
country and to protect the weak. He adopted the 
revived rule of the great S. Benedict, and through his 
reforms the monasteries, weakened everywhere and often 
destroyed by the Danish invasion, became a new power 
in English religion and education. At this time the 
religious houses were largely in the hands of secular 
canons, i.e. those clergy who, without parochial cures, 
lived a common life, with very slight rules, and often 
married. Everywhere abroad the impulse of good men 
was towards a stricter rule, and many of the English 
bishops and abbats wished to place all the important 
posts in England, and especially those belonging to the 
cathedral churches, in the hands of the monks. Dunstan 


i Cee 


146 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


did not interfere with those bishops who turned out the 
canons and put monks in their place. But he made 
no change at Canterbury when he became archbishop. 
His influence was in favour rather of making the 
learned, and he does not seem even to have interfered 
with their marriages, which there was a growing tendency 
abroad to consider unlawful. Glastonbury, long the 
centre of British legends and memories, became under 
him the source of learning to the West. 

When a new Danish invasion began the Church was 
strong enough to resist it, not by arms, but by the self- 
sacrificing lives of her clergy. At the end of the tenth 
century England was again attacked and overrun. lfeah 
(S. Alphege), archbishop of Canterbury, was ma 
rather than despoil the churches and the poor for his 
ransom. The English king Athelred fied, and the land 
was ruled by the heathen Swegen. For a while Eadmund 
Ironside, #thelred’s son, held out against the barbarians, 
but when Swegen died his son Canute soon became king 
of all England. 5 

Canute, born a heathen, had been baptized, and he 
gradually grew into a consistent Christian and a d 
king. Under him the Council of Wise Men, in which 
sat the bishops, passed laws for the reform and support 
of the Church. He rebuilt monasteries and churches, 
and upheld strict justice both to poor and rich. He 
visited Rome, and from thence he sent a touching letter 
to his people, telling them how he had reproached the 
pope for the money he took from English archbishops 
for the pallium (a sign of jurisdiction over bishops) which 
he gave them; but had promised to pay the ‘ Peter’s- 
pence’ which King Offa had first given for the support of 
the English school at Rome ; how he had repented of his 
sins, and would ever after care for the welfare of the 
English. ‘I have sent this letter before me,’ he wrote, 
‘that all the people of my realm may rejoice in my well- 
doing, for, as you yourselves know, never have I spared 
and never will I spare to spend myself and my toil in 
what is good and needful for my people.’ 

Canute died in 1035, and in 1042 England had again 
the line of her old West Saxon kings. Edward the 


THE EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH 17 


Confessor (1042-1066) was a good man, pious, temperate, 
gentle, but he was ruled by others, and his patronage was 
no real support to the Church. During his reign the 
influence of his friends over sea prepared England for 
a new conquest. He was the son of the Norman lady 
Emma and of /Ethelred, and during the Danish rule he 
had taken refuge in Normandy. When he returned, he 
was ruled in State affairs alternately by Karl Godwine, a 
friend of Canute’s, and by the family of Earl Leofric, 
who ruled in the Midlands. In Church matters he was 
wholly under the influence of foreigners. 

The Normans, not long converted to Christianity, were 
the devoted friends of the see of Rome. ‘Their religion 
was strict and orderly, and rich in the beauty of art, 
music, and learning. With them the monasteries set a 
standard of devotion which raised the whole tone of the 
clergy, and Church law, now becoming brought together 
in books, was enforced over clergy and laity alike. 
Edward began to make Norman bishops of English sees, 
hoping no doubt to improve the English Church. He 
made Robert of Jumieges archbishop of Canterbury, Ulf 
bishop of Dorchester, and William bishop of London. 
Only the last was a good bishop. Robert brought in the 
pope’s power, which had been little known in England, 
and Ulf ‘did nought bishoplike.’ Edward gave himself 
to private devotion, lived more and more like a monk, 
and founded the abbey of S. Peter at Westminster, where 
he was buried, and where his shrine still remains. In 
1052 the English people rose and drove out the Normans, 
and for the last years of Edward’s reign, Godwine, and 
after him his son Harold, ruled the land. Robert of 
Jumieges, though he was still lawful archbishop, was 
replaced at Canterbury by Stigand, bishop of Winchester ; 
but men would not recognise > him, and when he received 
the pallium from an unlawful pope, foreigners regarded 
him, and England with him, as in schism. 

Thus when Edw ard, called the Confessor for his simple 
Christian life, died in 1066, the pope and the Church 
abroad were ready to support William, duke of Normandy, 
who said Edward and Harold had promised him the crown 
of England. 


18 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


On October the 14th, 1066, Harold was slain in the 
great battle of Senlac near Hastings, and William the 
Conqueror became king of the English. He stretched 
his power northwards to the borders of the now united 
kingdom of the Scots, and to the borders of Wales. 
Under him the English Church, submitted to new and 
powerful foreign influences, was to learn to abandon its 
isolation and come into the family of national Churches, 
During the age since Canute, the a had become more 
careless, the monasteries more lax. Everywhere learning 
was behind the standard of the rest of Europe, and the 
clergy who joined with lay folk in the courts of hundred 
and the shire, as their bishops did with the wise men in 
the National Council, suffered themselves to be little 
distinct from those whom it was their duty to instruct 
and elevate. The English were sleepy, unpatriotic, self- 
indulgent ; and it needed the Norman despotism and the 
enthusiasm of the Norman bishops to stir the people and 
the Church to life. 


CHAPTER III 
THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 


Wiut11am THE Conqurror came to the throne determined 
not only to subjugate the English people, but to reform 
the English Church. He placed in the office of archbishop 
of Canterbury his friend Lanfranc, abbat of Bee in Nor- 
mandy, an Italian born at Pavia and formerly a lawyer. 
The wide culture of this man, his powers of organisation 
and of discipline, were of great service to the Church. 
Gradually the English bishops were replaced by Normans, 
who taught a stricter way of life, introduced foreign 
learning and foreign church music. Abroad a reforma- 
tion was being spread over the whole Church by the 
genius of Pope Gregory vu. He held that the Church 
should be entirely separate from the State, ruled by her 
own laws, judged by her own courts. Simplicity, pre- 
cision, legal definition were ideas which appealed to 
William and to Lanfranc. Thus the king issued an 
edict by which he ordered that the Church courts and 
the lay courts should be kept separate, and that the 
clergy should be judged in the Church courts and by 
the Church law and canons now collected by foreign 
lawyers. All criminal trials too, in the last resort, were 
placed under the charge of the bishops; for the trial of 
criminals was by ordeal, and this was now to be held 
under the Church’s sanction only. This rule lasted till 
the Church abolished ordeal early in the thirteenth 
century. 

But while William thus seemed to give great powers 
to the Church, he did not suffer his own power to be 

19 


20 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


diminished. He would not allow the Church councils 
to pass any new canons without his sanction, a rule which 
later kings always endeavoured, though not always suc- 
cessfully, to enforce, and which was finally confirmed at 
the Reformation, and is still the law of the land. He 
forbade the excommunication of any of his men without 
his leave. And he kept a tight hold on the relations 
of the Church with Rome. He would not allow the 
archbishop of Canterbury to recognise as pope any one 
who had been elected to that office unless he had first 
received his permission to recognise him. When 
Gregory vu. demanded that he should recognise England 
to be granted to him by the papacy, and should pay tribute, . 
he replied that he would still pay the Rome-scot or 
Peter’s-pence as his predecessors had paid it, but he 
would never admit any subjection to the papacy, as the 
English kings had never been subject. 

William and Lanfranc, with the Norman bishops, made 
order and rule in the English Church. Many new monas- 
teries were founded, and stricter obedience to the 
monastic rule of S. Benedict was enforced. Only one 
Englishman continued to hold his bishopric, the saintly 
Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester, who gave great help to 
the king and archbishop in putting down the slave-trade 
which the English had long wickedly carried on from 
the port of Bristol. Though at first the Norman monks 
and bishops were thought to be harsh, they soon became 
the protectors of the English people against the tyranny 
of a new king. 

William 1. was a very different man from his father. 
He was grossly wicked and cruel, setting law at defiance. 
When Lanfranc died, he long kept the archbishopric 
vacant, and he was aided in robbery and oppression of 
the Church by his minister, Ranulf Flambard, whom he 
made bishop of Durham. At length, when he thought 
himself dying, he made Anselm, abbat of Bec, archbishop. 
Anselm was a man of great learning and of holy life, a 
philosopher and a saint, whom all men loved; but he 
could not withstand a strong king. Refusing to pay the 
unjust demands which would have beggared the Church 
and involved him in the sin of buying holy things, he 


. THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 21 


was driven into banishment, and only returned when 
the evil king was dead. 

Henry 1., himself a scholar, began by granting a 
charter which gave freedom to the Church from all 
unjust demands. but before long he came into conflict 
with Anselm on the question of investitures. Who 
should give to the bishops and abbats the formal ad- 
mission into their estates and into their spiritual position ? 
The king claimed to bestow, not consecration, but the 
outward signs of spiritual power, the pastoral staff and 
the ring. Anselm had the whole support of the pope 
when he refused to yield what would have implied that 
the Church owed to the State her power to convert and 
comfort sinners and to strengthen humble Christians in 
the way of faith. At length, in 1107, the dispute was 
settled by the Church’s fully recognising that her lands 
were held from the State, by the bishops-elect doing 
homage to the king before consecration, and the king 
giving up all claim to bestow any signs of spiritual 
power. 

This was the result of Anselm’s life, and in 1109 he 
passed away in peace, leaving behind him a memory 
which did much to knit together English and Normans, 
statesmen and priests. 

In Scotland the close of the eleventh century was a 
time of great importance to the Church. ‘The Low- 
lands had asserted their power over the Highlands, and 
the southern kings, of half-English race, were rulers 
of the whole land. Malcolm Canmore, who came to the 
throne in 1057, married, for second wife, Margaret, 
great-niece of Edward the Confessor. She was a wise 
woman and an instructed Christian, and with the aid of 
priests, sent to her by Lanfranc, she worked a yeforma- 
tion as great as, or greater than, he worked in the south. 
Monasteries sprang up everywhere to cultivate the land 
and teach the rules of a holy life. The Church was 
brought into union of customs with the south, and the 
Lord's Day began to be strictly observed. The reform 
continued under her sons. ‘The parochial system was 
established, and later, the land was mapped out into 
dioceses. Under David I. (from 1124) cathedrals were 


22 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


rebuilt, new dioceses formed, and i appointed to 
the cathedral churches. 

The Church was now extended to diakiant Caithness, 
which in the twelfth century became united with the 
Scots first in ecclesiastical and then in civil bonds. It 
was previously ruled by Norsemen, like Orkney and 
Shetland. In 1110 S. Magnus was murdered in Orkney 
by his Christian cousin, Haco, and in 1137 the cathedral 
of Kirkwall was raised to his memory. These islands 
remained ecclesiastically subject to the archbishop of 
Drontheim in Norway until 1472. 

It was the great work of David 1. that he founded the 
monasteries tor which Scotland was long renowned, and 
whose magnificent ruins still excite the admiration of — 
travellers. The ancient Culdees he replaced by more 
strict societies: by the Benedictines, as at Selkirk and 
Dunfermline ; by the Premonstratensians, as at Dry- 
burgh ; by the Cistercians, as at Newbattle and Malaaies 
and by the Augustinian canons, as at Jedburgh and t 
house of the Holy Rood by Edinburgh. Under him, 
largely through their influence, the Celtic Church of 
Scotland became merged in the Church of English teach- 
ing and ritual and Roman origin. 

The years that followed the death of 8. Anselm were 
not a time of conflict. He seemed to have left to the 
Church a legacy of peace. ‘The arrangement which he 
had made with the king worked harmoniously, and the 
State made no more excessive claims at the expense of 
the Church. But a time of peace became, as so often 
in the Church’s history, a time of secularisation. The 
State felt that it needed the help of Churchmen, and 
the Church for the time seemed to fancy that its best 
work lay in helping the State. 

Henry 1. set before him the task of organising the 
administration in a way which should make the royal 
power felt everywhere in the land. He found his best 
agents among the clergy. In the thirty years that 
followed the death of S. Anselm, the government was 
conducted mainly by clergy, carrying out the plans of 
the great king who established the Norman rule on a 
firm basis. Roger, bishop of Salisbury, was the king’s 


THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 23 


chief adviser, and he was assisted, as the years went on, 
by many members of his own family, who founded a sort 
of new clerical and ministerial nobility, in the hands of 
whom were the reins of government, the secrets of policy, 
the machinery of administration, both central and, to a 
less degree, local also. The clergy, so largely employed 
in work which nowadays is considered to belong almost 
exclusively to laymen, were rewarded by ecclesiastical 
preferment. The king employed Churchmen for his 
work, and he used the Church as a means of rewarding 
his servants. Excuse for this may be found in the fact 
that the clergy were helping, as probably no others at 
the time could have helped, in the founding of a system 
of just government which would benefit all classes. 
Spiritual duties were too often neglected, and yet in the 
end it was not all loss. Bishops and clergy were seen 
collecting taxes, hearing law-suits, conducting negotia- 
tions with foreign powers, even leading armies in the 
field ; but in each of these cases something was gained 
for the cause of right. Something was done to teach 
honesty in money matters, justice in litigation, a respect 
for right between nations, and the national claim to be 
governed by rulers whom the nation had chosen. 

Henry «. left a firm fabric behind him, a strong govern- 
ment and just laws. He left them in the hands of the 
clergy to maintain. During the first years of Stephen 
all went well, so long as Roger of Salisbury and his 
family conducted the administration. An early charter 
of Stephen’s shows that he considered that it was the 
influence of the clergy which had largely decided the 
people to choose him for king, in spite of the claims of 
Matilda, King Henry’s daughter, and the oaths which 
many of the great men had taken to her. The new 
king would have been wise if he had kept up the 
tradition of his predecessor. Buta hasty jealousy caused 
him to break with the Church, to seize and imprison 
Roger, bishop of Salisbury, and two other bishops, his 
near kinsmen; and from that moment his own throne 
was never secure, and the crown was contested for many 
years between Matilda and himself. Still he said he 
would allow the churches to choose freely their own 


24 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


bishops, and it is possible that this freedom was for a 
time enjoyed. At each step of the conflict it can be 
seen that the Church retained her influence. Church 
councils chose or repudiated the different claimants, and 
it was the clergy who still maintained order where it was 
maintained at all. 

The reign of Stephen is in many respects one of the 
most important in the history of the English Church. 
For some time a new influence had been at work counter- 
acting the secularity which had set in after S. Anselm’s 
death. Abroad, S. Bernard, from the abbey of Clair- 
vaux, had inspired high and low with a new fervour of 


devotion, a new and living faith in the Crucified, and a 


new ideal work for Him in the cloister and in the world. 
Popes, kings, nobles, and humble monks set about their 
duties under his guidance with a new enthusiasm. It 
was not long before the revival of religion spread to 
England. Henry of Blois, King Stephen’s brother, who 
was a sincere disciple of S. Bernard, though very much 
of a statesman also, became bishop of Winchester, and 
it was he who for a long time directed the course of 
public events during the conflict for the crown. If he 
was led away little by little from S. Bernard’s ideal of 
simplicity, it was not so with others. More monasteries 
were built in England between 1135 and 1154 than in any 
other corresponding period. The monks set themselves 
to work as well as to pray. They colonised many waste 
places, and the deserts which William 1. had left after 
his ‘harrying’ of the north began to blossom, said pious 
chroniclers, like the garden of the Lord. The spiritual 
work of the Church in the reign of Stephen will be 
readily understood by one who will think how many of 
the abbeys he has seen, or of the parish churches in the 
style which we call Norman, were built in that reign. 
The chroniclers of the time tell many stories which show 
how much good work was done. A new religious order 
was founded by an Englishman, Gilbert of Sempringham. 
It admitted both men and women, and it took special 
care of education, that both sexes should be taught to 
serve God with a reverent intelligence as well as a godly 
fear. We have tales, too, of singular sanctity in the quiet 


———— 


THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 25 


country villages, of men and women the holy example of 
whose simple lives was known far and wide; and our 
village churches were then, as much as they have ever 
been in times more famous for religious movement, the 
centres of parish life. In spite of warfare, and of the 
savage deeds of the barons, which were probably confined 
to a comparatively small part of the country, the reign 
of Stephen was a time of quiet growth. 

It was inevitable also that it should bea time of growth 
in assumption on the part of the clergy. The clergy had 
been trained to govern and to judge, and now the civil 
wars left few others who would do either. It seems that 
the county courts, where justice had been administered 
under the sheriffs, broke down utterly. The Church 
courts stepped in to fill up the gap. Men began to take 
to them many suits which a more accurate definition of 
the boundaries between Church and State would have 
left within the province of the latter. In this way cases 
concerning advowsons and presentations to livings fell 
into, the hands of the Church, and also cases concerning 
wills and debts, and many moral questions. The Church 
law was being codified, and men were able to appeal to 
it more definitely than, in spite of the work which the 
clergy had done towards codifying also the customary 
law of the country, they could appeal to the common 
law. And while all over the country clergymen were 
taking an important part in publie affairs, and were 
claiming for their courts a widely extended jurisdiction, 
a new body of workers was being raised up in a sort of 
school which the Archbishop Theobald established in his 
palace at Canterbury. Here men were quietly trained, 
with discipline and prayer, and with all the learning of 
the day, to take up the work which Henry 1.’s clerks had 
done, and to carry it on in the spirit of S. Bernard. 

Henry of Winchester was incessantly active through- 
out the troubles of the Civil War. Theobald came 
forward at the end quietly to settle the question that 
was left to decide. When it was agreed that Henry of 
Anjou, Matilda’s son, should succeed Stephen, naturally 
enough it was Theobald who supplied some of the men 
who should help the new king to bring back to the 


26 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 
kingdom the firm government which his grandfather had 


maintained. 

Henry u. began his work with a young man from the 
archbishop’s school by his side. Thomas, son of Gilbert 
Becket, a London merchant, was inseparable from the 
king during the early years of the reign. Working 
together, they restored the courts of justice, the system 
of taxation and police, brought England forward again, 
with the Continental possessions of the king, among the 
nations of Europe, and set about great legal reforms. 

All went well till Henry made his friend archbisho 
of Canterbury. Then it was seen that though val 
desired reform in Church and State, the root ideas of 
each were different. : 

The first quarrel was at Woodstock, on a matter of 
taxation. The chief conflict soon began, on the question 
whether Church or State should have the ultimate 
judgment of clergy who had broken the law. The 
clerical class was a very large one, and it included many 
whom we now regard merely as lay officials of the 
Church. Should all these be summoned before the lay 
courts, charged there with crime, then judged, if the 
bishop claimed them, in the Church courts, and then 
sent back to the lay courts to receive a civil punishment 
besides the ecclesiastical one which the Church court 
might have thought fit to inflict? This was what Henry 
claimed in The Constitutions of Clarendon, 1164. But 
Archbishop Thomas declared that this would be giving 
two punishments for the same offence, contrary to the 
elementary principles of justice. No less strongly did 
he assert that the Church had the privilege of exclusively 
judging all clerical offenders. This was the question 
which caused the great quarrel between the two friends, 
which banished Becket from England, and which agitated 
Europe for many years. 

Becket had a strong party on his side. He was an 
Englishman, and popular. He seemed to represent a 
cause which many of the clergy and people had learned 
to value—the claim of each class to have its own separate 
rights. But by no means all the clerical feeling was in 
his favour, The king had many bishops who stood by 


THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 27 


him, some no doubt in hope of preferment, some from 
higher motives. The wisest and most unprejudiced 
chronicler of the day will not judge between them. 

The quarrel was complicated by the king’s foreign 
interests, and the pope steered a hesitating course 
between the combatants. At last, after many attempts 
at a compromise, matters were brought to a crisis by 
Henry making Roger, archbishop of York, crown his 
son Henry. It has always been the privilege of the see 
of Canterbury to crown English kings, and Becket was 
the last man in the world to give up his own rights or 
the rights of his office. The pope, who had from the 
first condemned the Constitutions of Clarendon, now at 
last pronounced decidedly against the king, and it was 
clear that he would be excommunicated. He gave way, 
and Becket returned to Canterbury.. When the king 
saw how popular the archbishop was in England, and 
how strongly he still held by his principles and his 
claims, he repented of his concessions and uttered the 
angry words which led to the murder in Canterbury 
Cathedral on December 29, 1170. 

The result of the murder and the horror which it 
evoked everywhere was that Henry had to yield every 
point that had been disputed. How much he practically 
gave up it is not very easy nowto say. At any rate, he 
retained the appointment of bishops in his own hands, 
and he tried in his own courts any clergy who were 
charged with poaching. In other matters the Church 
probably won. Clerks were tried and punished by the 
Church’s courts when they pleaded ‘benefit of clergy.’ 
And Becket’s death for a time won peace. For nearly 
forty years there was no conflict between Church and 
State. 

Becket’s death marks an epoch in our Church history. 
The kings now recognised that so far as jurisdiction was 
concerned they must leave the Church to herself. They 
accepted the principle of William the Conqueror, that lay 
judges should not intrude themselves into what concerns 
the cure of souls, and that ecclesiastical persons, as well as 
things churchly, should be left to the rule of the clerical 
estate. This led to two results. In the first place, it 


28 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


helped the political forces of England to group them- 
selves definitely into three classes, recognised by the 
constitution as separate and homogeneous. The Church 
became the first estate of the realm. She had her own 
courts, her own laws, her own officers. At every point 
she acted upon, and was reacted upon by, the State. 
But she remained a separate, distinct organisation, the 
Ecclesia Anglicana, with her own distinct liberties, and 
her ministers were a separate class, if not a caste. In the 
same way the estates of the baronage and the commons 
asserted their own privileges and distinctions ; and it is 
significant that it was just after the struggle which ended 
with the murder of 8S. Thomas, that we hear of ‘the 
commons’ as a separate and constituted class. 

Secondly, the Church, as a separate estate, was sup- 
ported in its position from the centre of Christian 
Europe. The popes, leaving for a time direct inter- 
ference with the kings, dealt in friendly manner with 
the Church, asserting, wherever it was possible, a right 
to counsel and command. Henry u.’s justiciar would 
not allow their envoys to land in England without the 
king’s consent, or without showing their letters, and 
no moneys were allowed to be collected for the pope’s 
needs. But none the less the pope seemed the natural 
head of a separate and organised estate. Henry u. 
made peace with the pope. He conquered Ireland, or 
rather made settlements on its extremities, chiefly in the 
lands where the Norsemen had ruled before; and his 
conquest decided that the Irish Church should in all 
things follow the uses of the Church of England. He 
subdued the Scots, and he took part in a hot debate 
which vexed the Church of Scotland. A long contest 
about the King of Scots’ appointment to the see of 
S. Andrews led to the reassertion of the claims of the 
archbishop of York to be metropolitan of the northern 
sees, and from that to a claim of the pope that he alone 
had supreme rule over the Scottish Church. For lon 
the archbishops of Canterbury and York had contend 
for this supremacy, but at last the southern metropolitan 
had tacitly abandoned his claim. This squabble, for it 
was little better, lingered on till Scotland won her 


THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 29 


freedom from the severe rules which Henry u. had 
enforced, and the see of York was no longer able to 
stretch its hand over the bishoprics beyond the Tweed. 
The development of Scotland continued to progress on 
feudal lines, and with the power of the civil law in her 
constitution, went the feudalisation of her Church. In 
England different principles brought out very different 
results. 

Henry uu. died under pledge of a crusade. Becket’s 
two successors had not meddled with the State or the 
State with them. They were: busy checking, or trying 
to check, the dangerous claims of the great monastic 
houses to exemption from Episcopal control ; but Arch- 
bishop Baldwin (1184-1191) brought the Metropolitan 
authority of Canterbury to bear on Wales by visiting the 
whole country, preaching in the lonely valleys, and 
celebrating as primate in the four cathedrals of the 
Welsh. The ancient see of S. David’s, whose splendid 
cathedral was now beginning to rise from the ground, 
through the reigns of Henry u. and his sons, endeavoured 
to assert its own independence and supremacy over the 
other Welsh sees; but Gerald de Barri, half Norman, 
half Welsh, whom the chapter more than once elected, 
was never allowed to become their bishop, and the Welsh 
Church had gradually submitted before Edward 1. con- 
quered the whole land. 

The crusade which Henry u. planned, and Richard 1. 
carried out, left England to the rule of Churchmen. 
The fabric of government which the Henrys had built was 
maintained so long as there lived clerks who had been 
trained at the court of Henry m. William Longchamp, 
bishop of Ely, Walter of Coutances, archbishop of Rouen, 
and Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, in turn were the 
chief ministers of Richard 1. ; and though the first raised 
against him the hatred of clerk and lay alike, they kept 
the government firmly established over all causes and 
all persons, as well ecclesiastical as temporal, till Richard 
1. was dead. 

The reign of Richard, with its generous enthusiasm 
for the Holy War, which in its best aspect produced 
many noble religious characters among Englishmen, and 


—* 3A 


30 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


in its worst led to persecution of Jews and much needless 
bloodshed, gave England some years of internal peace, 
and saw among the bishops at least one notable saint. 
Hugh of Avalon, first prior of Witham, near Frome, and 
afterwards bishop of Lincoln, lived a simple life of piety. 
asceticism, and courageous protection of his people. £ 
the rest of the bishops were such as he,’ said Coeur de 
Lion, ‘no king or prince would dare to lift up his 
neck against them.’ But other bishops were worldly, 
avaricious, immersed in State affairs, negligent of their 
vast dioceses, struggling with recalcitrant monasteries 
If the clerical order flourished, religion most surely 
decayed. 

The bitter satire of clerical wits prepares us for what 
was to happen. When Richard died, the worst of our 
kings found himself held in check by a statesmanlike 
archbishop and by a great pope. Hubert Walter (1191- 
1205) managed, with difficulty, to please Innocent m. 
and avoid open war with John. On his death, the 
election to the see ended the peace which had lasted 
since Becket fell. Three claims were put in to elect, 
by the king, the bishops, the Canterbury monks; and 
finally, Innocent 11. himself, to whom each party had 
appealed, directed the last to choose Stephen Langton, 
an English priest, from among his own friends. John 
furiously plundered the monastery of Christ Church, 
and set the pope at defiance. The pope put England 
under an interdict. The king banished the bishops, 
put the clergy out of the law, seized their wives (for 
many were still married) and their goods, and by his 
tyranny broke up the University of Oxford. Then he 
was himself excommunicated. The results of this act 
were as important as those of Becket’s murder. John 
made peace with the pope, promised to restore all he 
had stolen, received back the bishops, and surrendered 
his kingdom into the hands of the Roman See to be 
held as a fief. 

This was the great triumph of the papacy in England. 
The policy of William 1. was reversed. ‘The pope was 
formally declared by the king, claiming the assent of 
the barons, to be supreme over England, and he, under 


THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 31 


his rule, had at his back a compact and organised estate. 
From this moment there were, more or less clearly 
marked at different dates, two parties in England. 
(1) Stephen Langton, the new archbishop, did his utmost 
to preserve English liberties, and was suspended by the 
pope for his support of Magna Carta. John promised 
that the clergy should freely elect their bishops, and 
the great Charter declared the freedom of the English 
Church. And the translation of the bones of St. Thomas 
declared the dignity of the new and great English saint. 
(2) On the other side, bishops looked to Rome for support 
and advancement, and monasteries looked to be freed 
from the control of their bishops. 

From Magna Carta onwards, 1215-1253, we notice the 
working out of the papai supremacy. In Scotland the 
popes were able through English weakness to definitely 
establish their direct supremacy. The friars whom 
Alexander 11., 1214-1249, warmly supported, were strong 
advocates of the pope’s claims ; and as the years went on 
Scotland became more papal, and at the same time her 
bishops became more secularised and her Church more 
corrupt. Good and wise popes preserved England to 
the young Henry 11., recognised the Charter, helped 
the State to govern and the Church to teach. But they 
began to flood England with foreigners, appointing, 
wherever and whenever they could, Italians to English 
sees and livings, and looking to Englishmen to support 
their needs by a constant and ruinous taxation. At the 
same time Langton turned earnestly to the work of 
Church Reform. 

The most potent agent of Reform was the new move- 
ment that came from abroad. From 1220-1224 the 
mendicant orders of S. Dominic (Black Friars) and S. 
Francis (Grey Iriars), followed by the Carmelites (White 
Friars) and Austin Friars, spread over England, settling 
among the masses of untouched population by the larger 
towns, ministering to the sick, preaehing to the whole, 
and gradually becoming masters of intellectual as well 
as spiritual work. The work of the friars gave the 
Church to the people and the people to the Church. 
Two saintly prelates showed the same spirit of holiness 


> = Fay 


32 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


and self-sacrifice in high places. Edmund Rich, arch- 


bishop of Canterbury (1233-1240), and Robert Grosseteste, 
bishop of Lincoln (1235-1253), led simple lives, and 
withstood the king and the pope in their unlawful 
deeds. The land was being robbed right and left ; S. 
Edmund went into banishment rather than consent to 
it. Robert Grosseteste encouraged the friars, triumphed 
over the monks, and refused to obey the papal com- 
mands as ‘not to edification, but to most manifest 
destruction.’ 

Under the inspiration of this great man, the clergy 
and the commons protested against the pope’s demands, 
and the popular songs which the friars wrote and the 
people chanted, re-echoed the protest on behalf of the 
English nation and the English Church. Even Boniface 
of Savoy, archbishop of Canterbury (1243-1272), the 
queen’s uncle, who began as a grasping robber, learned, 
from Grosseteste doubtless, to withstand the worst acts 
of the pope and the king. And in the reformation 
which now spread over the Church, there was much of 
the spirit of him who ‘had been an open rebuker of 
pope and king, the corrector of bishops, the reformer 
of monks, the instructor of the clergy, the persecutor 
of the incontinent, a careful reader of the Scriptures, 
the hammer of the Romans whom he despised.’ 

After Grosseteste’s death the country became more 
and more disturbed, and during the Barons’ War, Church 
life was at a standstill. Simon de Montfort, the leader 
of the barons, was a religious man, but he had much 
of the persecuting spirit of his father, who had led a 
crusade against heretics in Southern Gaul. In the 
chronicles of the time he appears as ‘zealous for the 
law,’ a defender of Church and people, watchful, 
temperate, austere; yet a persecutor of Jews, ‘not free 
from the guilt of robbery and murder.’ 

It is to this time that there belongs the most famous 
of the many strange stories in which the popular dislike 
to the Jews, who, it may be remembered, were then 
the only ‘dissenters,’ found expression. In 1255 it is 
said that the Jews of Lincoln, a wealthy colony, of 
whom there is still a memorial in a fine stone house yet 


> 
, 


THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 33 


standing, stole a boy named Hugh, and did him to death 
in mockery of the Passion and Crucifixion. Such stories 
show the violence of public feeling, of which Earl Simon ~ 
took advantage when he plundered the Jews. The 
clergy discouraged the persecution, the more perhaps 
because they themselves suffered constantly from the 
extortion of papal legates. Constant demands for money 
to support the pope’s dignity and the pope’s wars, the 
intrusion of foreigners into English livings, the power 
of the king’s foreign kinsfolk, Boniface of Savoy (arch- 
bishop of Canterbury) and Aymer of Valence (bishop 
elect of Winchester), made the condition of the clergy 
and the monks intolerable, and called loudly for reform. 
At the great Council of Oxford, 1258, it was ordered 
that ‘the state of the Holy Church be amended,’ but 
little or nothing was done, and as the political troubles 
grew the religious difficulties seem to have been for- 
gotten. Yet the reforming work of the friars continued, 
and from within, rather than from without, the Church 
gained new strength. After 1266 the land was again 
at peace, and though there was an attempt to reverence 
Simon de Montfort as a saint, the Church suppressed 
it, since he died excommunicate. In spite of this, the 
war had shown that the Church belonged to no party, 
for bishops had been of both sides, and of the monastic 
chroniclers some were enthusiastic for the barons’ cause, 
some steadfast supporters of the king. Henry u1.’s long 
reign came to an end in 1272. It had sorely embittered 
the feelings of Englishmen against the Roman court. 
It had impoverished and degraded the Church. But 
noble works of conversion, of healing, and of education 
had been done by the new mendicant orders, and saintly 
lives were still lived in high places as well as among 
the poor, as the history of S. Richard of Chichester, 
whom the English Church still remembers in her 
calendar, may show. 

The reign of Edward L was an important one for the 
Church. The king was from the first in want of money, 
and he turned, like his predecessors, to the Church for 
more than lawful aid. The wool of the Cistercian 
monks was often seized, the small income of the parish 

c 


. =" “~ « 
ry 


34 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


priests and the large rents of the bishops were heavily 
taxed. A new valuation of Church property was made 
about 1291, and three years later Edward actually 
demanded one-half of the revenues of the clergy. The 
king tried to make the clergy send representatives to 
the National Parliament, partly because he wished that 
every estate should be represented, partly because it 
would be easier then to tax them. But the clerical 
representatives rarely attended, and the Church always 
continued to tax herself in her Convocations. In 1296 
the pope forbade the clergy to pay taxes; the king 
then outlawed all the clergy. The deadlock between 
Church and State came at a time of great political 
difficulty, and the king had to own himself wrong. 
But Archbishop Winchelsea, who had championed the 
Church, now gracefully yielded, and declared that the 
clergy could freely give of their goods to the king. 
These money troubles, though the most important, were 
not the only causes of dispute between Church and 
king. In 1279 the Statute of Mortmain was passed, 
which made it illegal to grant lands to churches or to 
any corporations. For centuries there were attempts 
to evade this, and more recently it was frequently dis- 
pensed with by royal charter. ‘The demands of the 
pope did not grow less severe as time went on, and 
the Statute of Carlisle in 1307 forbade all collection 
for them in England. 

Edward and his successors clearly tried their best 
to restrain foreign interference with the Church, but 
their efforts were for the most part ineffectual. In 
1326 it is recorded that more than half of the cathedral 
patronage belonging to the bishop of Salisbury had been 
filled up by the pope. In 1807 the Knights Templar, 
a military and religious order which had great power 
in England, were attacked, and before long they were 
suppressed. The friars within a century of their founda- 
tion had become unpopular: the zeal for endowing 
monasteries showed a perceptible diminution. It was 
significant that Walter de Merton, bishop of Rochester, 
when he founded a college at Oxford, forbade its 
members to enter any religious order. Men’s minds 


THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 35 


under Edward nu. and Edward 1. were occupied with 
foreign wars, and with terrible distress within their 
own land. 

The great pestilence, which began in 1348, transformed 
the face of England, and weakened the Church beyond 
recovery for many a year. The archbishop of Canter- 
bury and many of the prominent ecclesiastics fell victims. 
While it is probable that nearly half the population was 
carried off, the mortality among the clergy was in a much 
higher proportion. 

The social distress, the lack of teachers, the constant 
irritation against the demands of Rome, which the two 
famous Statutes of Provisors, 1351, against papal patron- 
age, and Praemunire, 1393, against papal jurisdiction, 
were not able to allay, Jed to a new movement for reform 
which was directed against much which the Church held 
dear. The universities had become representative of the 
intellect of the country. and of its religion, and in Oxford 
arose John Wyclif (1320-1384), a man of great learning 
and remarkable power of expression, both in English 
and Latin, who could argue with the learned on their 
own ground, and arouse the people in the vulgar 
tongue. 

Wyclif’s writings, which had a European influence 
even more durable than that which they exercised on 
his native land, attacked the papal power, poured scorn 
and contempt on the friars as ‘children of the devil,’ 
and on monasticism as useless, declared that the Church 
should hold no property, and finally denied the doctrine 
of the Transubstantiation of the elements at the Holy 
Communion. He sent ‘poor preachers’ throughout the 
land to propagate his views, and in the disturbed state of 
public feeling his social doctrines were naturally strained 
to encourage revolution. Condemned himself, but still 
able to hold his own, long protected by John of Gaunt, 
uncle of the king, and by the University of Oxford, 
and supported by many thinkers zealous for reform, 
Wyclif escaped all punishment, and died in peace at his 
living, Lutterworth, December 28, 1384. 

The rebellion of 1381 brought his teachings into dis- 
repute. TIlis followers, discredited and persecuted, and 


Lt it one 


Sous! 


36 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


mixed up, during the next half-century, with political 
movements, which made the State regard them as a con- 
stant danger, dwindled away and practically died out. 
But his translation of the Bible into English, a work 
which the Church had attempted but never carried out, 
his vigorous sermons, and his powerful theological 
treatises, retained their influence long after his life was 
forgotten, and profoundly influenced many of the leaders 
of the great reformation of the sixteenth century. 

The age from Grosseteste to Wyclif is one of increasing 
confusion in the Church, of increasing difficulties, due to 


the aggression and the scandals of the papacy. Its best - 


men felt that a reformation was needed, but as yet every 
attempt to make one was unsuccessful. After his death 
Wyclif’s attempt to reform the Church died away. His 
opinions were rejected by the mass of Englishmen, and 
his schemes were defeated. His followers were nick- 
named the Lollards(meaning, probably, ‘canting fellows’), 
and they were felt to be a political danger. Parliament 
passed a law punishing heresy by death—the statute de 
haeretico comburendo (1401), which made legal in England 
the horrible sentence of burning which had long been 
given in foreign ands. Heretics were to be tried by the 
bishop’s court, but punished by the State. The statute 
was made still more severe in 1414, 

During the rest of the fifteenth century there was peace 
between Church and State. The popes strengthened their 
power in England by making the archbishops and Henry 
Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, kinsman of Henry v1., 
their legates, or representatives, and succeeding in exer- 
cising authority through them which they could not have 
exercised directly themselves. But the tide of opposition 
in Rome rose steadily. At the universities, from time 
to time, protests were raised against new pe appoint- 
ments or new alae exactions. Reginald Pecock, bisho 
and controversialist, opposed the Lollards, but with such 
freedom of argument that he found himself condemned 
by the Church. Students wrote against the papal power. 
Plain men denounced the evils of the non-residence of 
statesmen-bishops, the poverty of the parishes, the idle- 
ness of friars, the luxury of monks, and the absence of 


ee el 


THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 37 


resident priests through the grant of benefices to monas- 
teries. It is clear that there was a very strong feeling of 
discontent, practical rather than doctrinal, rising against 
the government of the Church. During the Wars of the 
Roses the feeling was in the background. It came to 
the front when a solid government was established under 
Henry vu. 


CHAPTER 
THE REFORMATION 


Tue English Reformation was the result of many causes, 
and, if it was not long foreseen, it was long prepared for. 
For a long time kings and parliaments had resented the 
claim of the popes to interfere in English affairs and to 
control the English Church. It was a common saying 
that everything could be bought at Rome, and the heavy 
expenses of all ecclesiastical appointments and appeals 
were felt by many in England, from the kings to the poor 
clergy. ‘The long civil wars had everywhere caused dis- 
turbance, suffering, and discontent, and a general feeling 
of insecurity. No man’s life, it seemed, was safe while 
the Wars of the Roses spread over the land, and in the 
country districts the powers of the Church had sunk very 
low, and men seemed to do what was right in their own 
eyes, without control of law or religion. The higher 
clergy obtained their appointments almost always through 
their powerful kinsmen or their services to the State, and 
they were too much concerned in polities to be respected 
by the people. In 1450 two bishops were murdered for 
political reasons, and there was no great stir made about 
it. The lesser clergy were not conspicuous for their 
good lives. The monasteries, though generally well con- 
ducted, were often in a condition of financial insecurity. 
The friars had long, as a body, lost popular confidence. 
The Church was politically, morally, and spiritually weak. 

When Henry VII. came to the throne in 1485, it was clear 
that some changes were necessary. Morton, his chief mini- 
ster, who became archbishop of Canterbury, made strict 
investigations and dissolved some of the monasteries, on 


3s 


THE REFORMATION 39 


account of grave scandals. Warham, the next arch- 
bishop, followed his example. There was a serious 
attempt to reform abuses from within. The bishops 
visited and censured, the preachers protested and showed 
the better way. But still the outward prosperity of the 
Church stifled any effectual reformation. The Church 
was popular, it seems, just in proportion as her work was 
ineffective. The end of the Middle Ages was a great 
era of church-building. The magnificent Perpendicular 
churches which are found in so many of the English 
towns and villages, which were prosperous in the reigns 
of Henry vir. and Henry vir., show that the rich mer- 
chants and the craftsmen were keen supporters of the 
Church. The monasteries and churches had much trea- 
sure of gold and silver: an Italian observer spoke of the 
great Benedictine, Carthusian, and Cistercian monasteries 
in England as ‘ more like baronial than religious houses.’ 

Outwardly, then, the Church in England was strong, but 
she was completely at the mercy of the State. Inwardly 
she was weak, not only on account of the absence of 
fervour among the clergy, but because she was divided. 
One party was intensely conservative, clinging to super- 
stitions which keen-witted men derided, obedient to the 
popes even at a time of degradation of the papacy, averse 
to the new learning which was slowly reaching England 
from Italy. A second party was alive to all the influences 
of the Renaissance, full of interest in Biblical study, in 
Greek, and in Church reform, but thoroughly loyal to 
the Catholic faith. And there was gradually arising a 
third party, ill instructed but enthusiastic, which was 
ready, not only to throw off the papal yoke, but also to 
break in many respects with the historic traditions of the 
Christian Church. 

As the Tudors became firmly seated on the throne, as 
their power, under Wolsey, increased abroad as well as at 
home, and as the people found that they represented 
and fostered all their material interests of trade, of dis- 
covery, and learning, it came to depend entirely on the 
king’s will what form the English Reformation, in its 
beginnings, should take. But the kings’ power went no 
further. They could not have stopped a reformation, 


rd 


40 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


for the bishops (such as Morton and Warham, Fox and 
Wolsey) were determined to reform. ‘They could not 
lave prevented a separation, at least to a very consider- 
able extent, from Rome, for the laity were determined 
to restrict the pope’s powers, and the clergy chafed under 
the intolerable financial burdens he laid on them, and 
resented the constant appointment of foreigners, who 
never intended to be resident, to English benefices. A 
reformation in England was absolutely certain, though 
few Englishmen and no foreigners foresaw it. A Venetian 
ambassador in England under Henry vu. regarded the 
clergy as supreme in war and peace, and the people as 
almost stupidly loyal to the Church. England seemed 
to be more insular and isolated than ever. Henry vi. 
desired, it is said, to ‘make a brazen wall round his 
dominions,’ and it might seem as if this would exclude 
religious as well as political influences from abroad. 
But it was impossible to check the national discontent 
with Rome. or the longing of earnest men for the reform 
of abuses, or the literary influences, liberating and widen- 
inz, of the revival of learning. An English Reformation 
was inevitable. Its guidance would inevitably fall into 
the hands of the strongest power, and that was the 
monarchy. 

In the west and the north it was different. Wales 
was now practically at one with England, now ruled by 
kings of Welsh blood. But it was not favourable to 
reformation ; and when the king set himself to dissolve 
monasteries and to give their property to Jaymen, he had 
but very little support in Wales. Under Henry vu. and 
Edward vr. the Reformation made little progress among 
the Welsh, but the spoliation impoverished the Church 
beyond recovery. al 

In Scotland the need of moral reformation was far more 
prominent than south of the Tweed. ‘The bishops, often 
employed in State affairs, and generally of royal or noble 
descent, were unworthy to rule or guide the Church. 
The monasteries were often corrupt and secular, The 
relations of James 1v. with Pope Alexander vi. are a 
shocking example of the corruption that reigned almost 
unchecked in the Scottish Church. Canons were broken 


THE REFORMATION 41 


at will by king and pope, money was unblushingly given 
and received, and the flock of Christ, commitied some- 
times to the care of mere children, was neglected and 
unfed. Under such circumstances there can be no won- 
der that the Scottish reformers, if religious men, resolved 
to destroy Romanism root and branch, and that with it 
they destroyed the ancient orders of the Apostolic 
ministry, and still less surprise that the barons regarded 
a reformation merely as the occasion for spoiling the 
Church. 

Very great importance attaches to the Reformation 
under Henry vu., because it swept away much that 
was never restored, much that all reformers, whether 
Catholic or Protestant, wished to see put away. But the 
importance may easily be exaggerated. For the changes 
made in the following reigns were in many ways equally 
great. Much was put back, much more was taken away. 
The final form in which the English Church organised 
its reformed constitution was not reached till the days 
of Queen Elizabeth. 

Morton and Warham were followed by Wolsey, who, 
though only archbishop of York, had great. power over 
the whole of England as legate of the pope. He sup- 
pressed several monasteries and founded colleges, following 
the example of Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, and 
of the Lady Margaret, mother of Henry vu. He was in 
full sympathy with the new learning, and it is likely 
that if no further disturbance had occurred he might 
have succeeded in bringing the English Church into 
harmony with the wants of the people. But the move- 
ment for refurm became complicated by the private 
affairs of Henry vis. This king, himself a learned 
theologian and the opponent on the Catholic side of the 
German reformer Martin Luther—for which opposition 
he received from the pope the title of Defender of the 
Faith—became troubled by political difficulties, by the 
want of an heir, and by religious seruples as to the 
lawfulness of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon, 
the widow of his brother Arthur. This marriage, 
contrary to the law of the Catholic Charch, had received 
the sanction of a papal ‘dispensation.’ Divorce was 


42 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


impossible in the Western Church, and Henry now sought 
a declaration from the pope that his marriage, in spite of 
papal authority for it, was absolutely null, bein ae 
to law. From 1524 to 1533 Henry was engag: 

every means he could think of to procure a pie tae 
of the nullity of his marriage. The Pope avoided giving 
a decision, and at last Henry, supported by the opinion 
of many learned theologians that no power could dispense 
from the Divine law forbidding marriage with a deceased 
brother’s wife, sought the advice of the Convocations of 
Canterbury and York. These both decided, in 1533, that 
his marriage was illegal, ven before this decision 
Thomas Cranmer, who had chiefly advised him in the 
later stages of the affair and was now appointed arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, married him to Anne Bullen. | 
Wolsey, who had done his best for the king but was no 
favourite of the new queen, was already disgraced.» 
Henry’s violent breach with the ae f and eo appoin 


the ‘reformation that was now in full progress 

Already much had been done. Early in the reign of 
Henry vu. the freedom of the clergy of whatever degree 
from any courts but their own, which had become a 
source of great discontent and indignation among the 
laity, was restricted. The Church courts also were un- 
popular, on account of their excessive charges and their 
interference with the laity on every pretext. This 
unpopularity, and the increase of modern learning in 
England, were two very efficient causes leading to a 
strong movement for reform of the Church from without. 
The opinions of the foreign reformers spread to England, 
and though they had not at first any great influence, 
they tended to increase the feeling of unrest and to 
strengthen the king’s hands when he undertook to 
destroy the pope’s power. So far the great majority 
of Englishmen were with him, though they were in- 
different or hostile to the declaration of the nullity of 
his marriage. 

In 1529 a Parliament met which represented a large 
body of opinion, and was willing to assist Henry in 
all his plans. It proceeded to pass many acts against 





THE REFORMATION 43 


the pope’s power. Among these were acts forbidding 
appeals to Rome and making it penal to introduce papal 
bulls and to sell the pope’s pardons or indulgences; and 
when Wolsey was overthrown, the whole clergy of the 
land were declared to be outlawed for having accepted 
him as pope’s legate, contrary to the Statute of Prae- 
munire. For this they had to pay heavily; and in 1531 
the Convocations of Canterbury and York formally agreed 
that the king was ‘the singular protector, the only and 
supreme lord, and as far as is permitted by the law of 
Christ, even the supreme head’ of the Church of England. 
Henry expressly declared that he claimed no spiritual 
power; and the act was accepted by the great majority 
of Englishmen as merely declaratory of the claim always 
made by the English kings. 

In 1532 Parliament passed an act, at the request of the 
clergy, absolving them from the payment of Annates to 
Rome. In the same year Convocation accepted the 
principle asserted by William the Conqueror, and agreed 
not to enact canons without the king’s licence, or enforce 
them without his consent. At this point the king’s 
marriage question came into the dispute with.Rome, and 
here again the clergy took the king’s side. } In 1533 an 
act was passed restricting appeals to R Thus in 1534 
Fagin and Rome wore wasated and the © achbishop of, 
SS SSS 
positi hich rba ; ribu (nselm, 
ope of another world.’ In 1534 the position of the 
English was confirmed by the abolition of all appeals to 
Rome, of confirmation of bishops by the pope, and the 
rejection of all dispensations from him, and by the 
declaration of the Convocations that the ‘ bishop of Rome 
hath not by Scripture any greater authority in England 
than any other foreign bishop.’ Parliament then con- 
firmed the king’s assumption of the supremacy. In 1536 
the ‘authority of the Bishop of Rome’ was extirpated by 
statute. 

In much of this, in spite of the violence with which he 
acted, Henry carried the whole Church and State with 
him. It was different when he came to carry the 
statutes into execution. He delegated his ecclesiastical 







Looe a 


44 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


supremacy to a vicegerent, Thomas Cromwell, who 
acted in an utterly unprincipled and reckless manner. 
He beheaded Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, two 
of the holiest men in England, and several monks, for 
some offence against the Act of Supremacy. He sent 
commissioners to visit the monasteries, and in 1536 sup- 
pressed all those that had’ an income of less than two 
hundred pounds a year. ‘This caused a rebellion in the 
north (the Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536), which was sternly 
put down. In 1536 the Ten Articles were issued. These 
were drawn up by Convocation, and they stated the doc- 
trine of the Church of England to be based on the Bible 
and the first four general councils, and to affirm the Real 
Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, omitting all reference 
to the medieval doctrine of Transubstantiation. In 1538 - 
and 1539 all the greater monasteries were made to sur- 
render their property to the king, and Parliament dis- 
solved all religious houses. From this date Henry was 
supreme. Under his direction Protestants, following the 
views of Luther or of Zwingli, were burned. Acts of 
Parliament enforced the king’s will, and the Church was 
powerless to withstand it. In 1539 Parliament 

the Act of the Six Articles, affirming many doctrines of 
the Medieval Chureh (which Convocation recognised as 
accurate), and decreeing death by burning to all who 
denied the doctrine of Transubstantiation. From that 
year till the king’s death in 1547 his power was exercised 
against any who disputed his ecclesiastical supremacy. 
Many were executed for denying it, as also for denying 
Transubstantiation or asserting the authority of the pope. 
Efforts were now made to teach the people. The Bible 
was issued in a translation authorised by the king in 
1538, a book of Christian Doctrine (The Justitution of a 
Christian Man) was put out in 1537, another (The Erudi- 
tion of a Christian Man) in 1543, and a Primer of devotion 
in 1545. With this we may regard Henry VIL’s Refor- 
mation as ended: and we may sum up its results :— 

1. The Church of England decisively rejected the 
supremacy of the pope in all matters in which it was 
repudiated by the law of the land. 

2. The Church recognised the royal supremacy 


THE REFORMATION 45 


‘so far as the law of Christ allows’; and the claim of 
freedom from Rome long made by king and people, 
and the powers exercised by them from time to time 
ever since the beginning of English history, were 
formally declared lawful by Church and State. 

8. The Church of England formally dissociated itself 
from any action of foreign reformers, claimed to have 
the right to gov ern and reform itself, and asserted its 
determination not ‘to separate from the unity of Christ’s 
Catholic Church.’ 

While Henry vi. and the English bishops were 
reforming the Church in England and separating it from 
Rome, in Scotland also the long-needed Reformation had 
begun. There the wealth of the Church had been in- 
creased without any deepening of her spiritual life. in 
1472 S. Andrews was made an archbishopric, and 
Glasgow in 1492. The first archbishop of S. Andrews 
appears to have made an attempt at reform, but he was 
quickly deposed. There were some really active bishops, 
such as Elphinstone, the founder of the University of 
Aberdeen in 1494. But other bishops were concerned in 
the worst abuses. ‘Thus the Reformation soon fell into the 
hands of the nobles, whose aims were selfish and irre- 
ligious, and who were eager to oust the prelates from the 
State offices which they had largely engrossed, and to 
seize the lands of the Church and the wealth of the 
monasteries. The teaching of the foreign reformers, 
too, was readily taken up in Scotland; a preacher of 
Lutheran opinions, Patrick Hamilton, was burned for 
heresy ; and many trials, most of them ending in death, 
marked the reign of James v. (1513-1542). 

Cardinal Beaton, who might have reformed the Church, 
being a powerful statesman as well as archbishop of 8. 
Andrews, was murdered at the instigation of the nobles, 
and with the secret encouragement of Henry vim., in 
1546. ‘To complete the confusion, the crown was now 
held by a child, Mary Queen of Scots, whose French 
mother, Mary of Guise, was regent, and ‘civil war spread 
over the land. 

The Scottish Reformation was consummated by the 
work of John Knox. Himself a minister of the Church, 


46 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


he was led by abhorrence for the vices of the clergy, 
by a keen sympathy with the poor folk whose souls were 
unfed, and by a narrow and enthusiastic reception of 
the teaching of the most extreme foreign reformers, 
to throw himself heart and soul into the task of destroy- 
ing the old Church and raising up a new body in its 
place. The people were ready to follow him. Every- 
where they ‘lightlied the mass,’ ceased to attend the 
services of the Church, and openly disregarded Sunday. 
The nobles were eager to break down and destroy and 
to enter on the spoil. So long as Henry vm. lived the 
Scots reformers might have received assistance from 
him, and many of the nobles were ready to sell their 
country into his hands. But when he died, the political 
difficulties between the nations helped to keep their 
religious leaders apart; and though Knox was for some 
time in England, he returned to his own land more 
determined than ever on a work of destruction. Church 
synods again and again passed canons ordering the 
strictest reforms. Archbishop Hamilton (1547-1571) put 
forth a catechism of Christian doctrine in the vulgar 
tongue without any mention of Rome or the pope. But 
such measures were in vain in the face of a determined 
Protestant party, powerful nobles, a weak if not wicked 
queen, and, most of all, the evil lives of those who 
themselves should have Jed the movement for reform. 
The Protestant party, whose noble leaders called them- 
selves ‘the lords of the congregation,’ triumphed. Parlia- 
ment, under their influence and fired by the oratory of 
John Knox, destroyed at one blow all the privileges, 
the worship, and the wealth of the Church. ‘On the 
morning of the 25th of August 1560 the hierarchy was 
supreme, in the evening of the same day Calvinistic 
Protestantism was established in its stead.’ 

The destruction of the Church was accompanied by 
more lawlessness than was shown in any other land 
where Protestantism made its way. Everywhere the 
churches were robbed and the monasteries destroyed. 
‘Down with the crows’ nests,’ Knox is said to have 
cried, ‘or the crows will build in them again.’ It is 
impossible to estimate the amount of the destruction 


THE REFORMATION 47 


of fine buildings and beautiful works of art. The 
brutality of the people and the greed of the nobles 
turned what might have been a work of reform into a 
wholesale destruction. 

The Scottish Reformation established itself through 
violence, treason, and civil war. Mary queen of Scots, 
never deserting the Roman obedience, had to steer her 
course between political and religious rivalries of the 
most dangerous kind. She clung to every shred of 
power, but the nobles tore all from her. She tried 
every scheme of concession or of stubbornness to save 
the essentials of the Church, but she was helpless in 
the face of Knox, who ‘neither flattered nor feared 
any flesh.’ 

Gradually Knox built up a new polity, of the strictest 
Calvinistic sort. Holy orders were replaced by a ‘call’ 
from a congregation and admission to office by the 
neighbouring minister. The laying on of hands was de- 
clared unnecessary. Stern discipline was set up to reform 
the morals of the people and to punish ministers, ‘the 
eyes and mouth of the Kirk.’ Schools were founded and 
endowed, and the new clergy were given possession of 
the churches of those who refused to accept the Book of 
Discipline and the Book of Common Order. But the 
endowments of the parishes were lost, and the ministers 
of the new ‘ Kirk’ had hardly enough to support life. 

The difference between the English Reformation and the 
Scottish is easy to discern. The former was undertaken 
by men who disclaimed all intention of breaking the 
unity of Christ’s Church, and who deliberately rejected 
the most prominent characteristics of foreign Protes- 
tantism. The latter was avowedly and irreconcilably 
hostile to Catholicism. Scotland had for centuries in 
Church matters been alike papal and corrupt, and at 
the same time there had been no national protests 
against the papacy. In England a long chain of anti- 
Roman legislation showed the feeling of the laity, and 
many protests testified to the same sentiment among 
the clergy. The English Church and State alike were 
ready for a separation from Rome, but neither desired 
that the national Church should be destroyed. In 


va er 
48 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


England the people were friendly to the clergy: in 
Scotland the two were deadly foes. In England the 
Reformation was the work of many classes and many 
minds : in Scotland it practically depended entirely upon 
the greedy nobles and on one commanding religious 
leader with his followers. In England Church and 
crown held together: in Scotland the sovereign and 
the national religion went different ways. 

If the chief mark of the early English Reformation 
was its conservatism, and of the Scottish its Protestantism, 
the Church in Wales was reformed chiefly by robbery. The 
nationality of the people was ignored. Henry yu.’s 
rejection of Rome was accepted without demur, and 
English bishops under that king and his son familiarised 
the people with the changes that were most patent. But 
chief of all results was the practical disendcwment of the 
Welsh Church. ‘The monasteries had engrossed the 
revenues of the parishes more than in England, and 
these revenues were now transferred almost entirely to 
lay owners. The Welsh monasteries were far more 
numerous in proportion than the English, and the loss 
in spiritual provision, as well as in actual buildings used 
for sacred purposes, was proportionately greater. At 
the period of the Reformation the Welsh sees were 
held either by persons of doubtful character employed 
in politics (as Bishop Rawlins of S. David’s) or hy 
insignificant ecclesiastics, or by those who were rapidly 
transferred to other posts. ‘The Reformation gave to 
Wales no new sees and no new endowments. But two 
Welsh bishops stand out as being instruments of the 
preservation of Catholic continuity. It was Bishop Barlow, 
who had been consecrated to S. David’s in 1536 according 
to the old English (Sarum) rite, who was the chief 
consecrator of Archbishop Parker in 1559. And Anthony 
Kitchin, consecrated bishop of Llandaff in 1545, retained 
his see through all the changes till his death in 1563. 
Thus Barlow is a prominent example of the continuity 
of the Apostolic succession in the English Church, and 
Kitchin of the maintenance of canonical jurisdiction. 

In 1547 Henry vin. died. His son Edward VI. was a 
child, under the influence of self-seeking nobles whose 


THE REFORMATION 49 


attachment to Protestant opinions was largely influenced 
by their desire to enrich themselves. His short reign 
was therefore the time during which the English Church 
had the most Protestant aspect that she ever bore; and 
it was marked by spoliation even more complete than 
that of Henry vur. | The characteristic of the reign of 
Edward yi. is the absolute control claimed by the State 
over the Church in every way. It was a claim often 
made in the past and as often resisted, and a later 
reaction was to reject it again, but meanwhile the Church 
passed into subjection for two reigns. The bishops were 
required to take out new licences to exercise their juris- 
diction. This was a practical assertion of the royal 
supremacy, but it disclaimed all interference with the 
Scriptural authority of the episcopate. The endowments 
of religious guilds and chantry chapels (where prayers 
had been, said for the souls of the departed) were con- 
fiscated. |The king’s council in 1550 ordered the altars 
to be taken down and, ‘ instead of them, a table to be 
set up in some convenient part of the chancel within 
every church.’ Royal visitations compelled the ob- 
servance of the new order. Convocation and then 
Parliament released the clergy from the obligation to 


celibacy. Foreign Protestants were now made welcome¢é 


in England.” Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, 
had become more and more sideresied i) Gio within 
and inclined to accept their opinions. Three prominent 
foreigners came to England and greatly influenced the 
primate—Peter Martyr, an Italian, who was made Regius 
Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Martin Bucer, a German, 
who received a like post at Cambridge, and John a 
Lasco, a Pole, who received charge of the foreign com- 
munities in London. All these left England at the king’s 
death. John Knox, too, was for some time in England, 
and had some power among the advisers of change. 
While the English Church was thus, by State inter- 
ference, by the political and religious sympathies of her 
primate, and by the influx of foreign renegades from 
Catholicism, led in the direction of extreme Protestantism, 
she was not without compensating influences on the 
other side. The general feeling of the Church was so 


) 


x 
of 


‘ 
a 


50 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


strongly against the extremists, that it was found im- 
pussible to fill up five of the sees that fell vacant. 

This feeling was embodied in the books of common 
prayer that were now put forth for use in all dioceses. 
In 1549 was put forth, by royal authority and claiming 
the authority of ‘the learned men of this our realm 
in their synods and convocations provincial,’ the First 


oe Book of Edward YI- This was lar 
ranmer, and almost 


Knglishmen and from English sources. ‘The old Engli 
ser'vice-books (particularly those of of Sarum) were com- 
pared with early liturgies (especially the Eastern liturgies) 
and with recent Roman and Lutheran revisions of the 
ancient books. The great aim of the work seems to 
have been the restoratidn of Catholic simplicity, Medieval 
accretions and com plications were swept aver ae 
services, 10 
understand and follow. ‘ The Supper of the Lor ae 
the Holy Communion commonly called the Mass’ is 
the title given to the English office for the consecration 
and administration of the Body and Blood of Christ. 
This was rearranged from ancient liturgies, but all the 
prominent features were retained. At the same time 
it was made clear that the Latin service was regarded 
as overloaded with superstitions, and that it was the 
aim of the Church to substitute for the title * mass,’ by 
which the Holy Sacrament was ‘commonly called,’ that 
which would recall to men’s minds the essential features 
of the Communion of the Lord's Body and Blood. It was 
designed to make the whole book one for people as well 
as priests. With this aim the daily services were com- 
pressed into the offices of morning and evening prayer, 
the Bible was much more freely used, and points associated 
with superstition, such as the direct invocation of saints, 
were omitted. It is quite clear that the compilers 
wished to retain the immemorial setting of the great 
Sirraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion, and 
that they desired above all things to conform to the 
teaching of Holy Scripture and the primitive Church. 
Iu 1550 the form of ordination to the ministry was also 
Englished and simplified. 








THE REFORMATION 51 


In_1952_ the Erayer Book of 1549 was revised, and and ina 
Protestant direction. > The lass” was omitted 
altogether, and the ancient vestments were forbidden. 
Public forms of confession and absolution, which still 
remain, were added. This book is known as the Second 


Prayer Book. 


These latter changes were the result partly of Cranmer’s 
ce_with all parties and his liking for 

i S artly of the influence of the : 
Second Prayer Book (of 1552) had no écclesiastical 


probably it was never put into use, or only 
in a very few places. It was authorised by Parliament 
in an Act of Uniformity, following on an earlier Act 
Yeas establishing the use of the First Book. 






Edward’s death, and the brief reign of his cousin, 
Jane the Queen,’ ay the critical period of the English 
movement for reform. e was 1 


The power of the State was in_ 
the hands of extrameint utterly unprincipled Protestants, 
and there was ry si f-desire to break completely 
Settee Wittarie pact of tha Church. : 


cal_loyalt Englishmen dethroned 
Jane and placed Mary, the child of Henry vi. and 


pee Srezon, on the throne, {Like her mother 
she-wa rm adherent of the papacy, and her first 
thought was reunion with Rome. By royal injunctions 
and Acts of Parliament the legislation of Edward v1. 
was swept away, and the Church was brought back into 
the position it occupied in the last years of Henry vin. 
The chief bishops, including Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, 
were declared guilty of heresy, and held in prison. The 
Queen married her kinsman Philip of Spain, and another 
kinsman, Reginald Pole, was sent by the pope as legate 
to ‘reconcile’ England to Rome. ‘The old statutes 
against the Lollards were revived, but the monasteries 
were not restored, and an Act of Parliament confirmed 
their confiscated property to its possessors. The married 
clergy were everywhere deprived, or at least required 
to abandon their wives. By 1555, the work of Henry 
vu.’s reformation, save only as regards the monasteries 
and the assumption of very considerable powers of 
ecclesiastical supremacy by the crown, was undone. 


, *°* 2. 


52 THE CHURCH’IN GREAT BRITAIN 


‘The claims to administer the affairs of the Church, to be 
the chief ordinary of the Church, and to be the source of 
jurisdiction in the Church were unknown to the law and 
the constitution in the Middle Ages, and were given up 
by Mary and never again claimed, though part of the 
authority which was connected with them lasted on till 
1641.’ Mary set up a Court of High Commission to 
carry out the ecclesiastical laws, and it was by virtue 
of the royal supremacy that she deprived bishops ; but 
otherwise she did not directly interfere with the powers 
of the Convocations or Parliament. 

The re-establishment of the Roman power was followed 
by a persecution which has made Mary’s reign infamous 
in English history. Without the slightest political 
ground, and mainly for rejection of the doctrine of 
Transubstantiation, more than two hundred and eighty 
persons were burned in sixteen English dioceses. Of 
these four were bishops, Cranmer, Hooper, Ridley, and 
Latimer. In Wales, Bishop Farrar of S. David's also 
perished at the stake. Ridiey and Latimer were burned 
at Oxford on October 16, 1555. The last words of 
the latter long rang in Englishmen’s ears, and were 
triumphantly vindicated within three years by the 
abolition of the papal supremacy for ever. ‘ of 
good cheer, Master Ridley,’ he said, ‘and play the man. 
We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace 
in England as I trust shall never be put out.’ . 


Sranmer 
yas condemned by the pope. He recanted many of 
his opinions, bot at length an Miaeee 
was burned at Oxford. 

He was succeeded by Cardinal Pole, in spite of whose 
mildness of disposition the burnings went on. Besides 
the prominent men who suffered, many fanatics and 
ultra-Protestants died for their faith ; and however little 
the majority of Englishmen sympathised with their ~ 
opinions, there was but one feeling as to the cruelty 
of their punishment. In the last year of her life Mary | 
had contrived to alienate every friend. She was at issue 
with the pope, who wished to supersede Pole, and she 
refused to allow any intercourse with Rome. Her 
husband left her to die alone. Her people even prayed 


THE REFORMATION 53 


for her death, that the persecution might cease. On 
November 17, 1558, she passed away, and the next day 
Pole followed her to the grave. 

There was never any doubt as to what would happen at 
her death. The whole land joyfully welcomed Elizabeth, 
King Henry’s only surviving child, and already trusted 
her sagacity ard moderation. Her work was clearly set 
before her. It was the completion of the long movement 
for ecclesiastical reform.—(1) Under Henry vin. the nation 
had repudiated the papal supremacy. (2) Under Edward 
vi. common prayer and the celebration of the sacraments 
in English had been won, as well as the liberty of the 
clergy to marry. (3) Under Mary the abolition, for those 
days, of the monasteries which had engrossed so much 
of the parochial endowments was legally confirmed. 
(4) It remained for Elizabeth to procure the settlement 
of the Church in its national independence. 

Under Elizabeth the long movement of the Reformation 
reached its most important crisis. She was determined 
to have a National Church in a National State, and in this 
determination she had the vast majority of her people 


. with her. She declared that she would rule with the 


power of supreme governor of the Church of England, 
and that she meant by that phrase, ‘the authority under 
God to have the sovereignty and rule over all manner of 
persons born within her realms, of what estate, ecclesiastical 
or temporal, soever they be, so as no other foreign power 
shall or ought to have any superiority over them.’ 

The first necessity of the reign was to secure that the 
pope should no longer execute jurisdiction in England. 
His power was repudiated by the Supremacy Act, 1559, and 
the English service was restored (the Prayer Book of 1552 
revised in a sense accordant with the ancient teaching of 
the Church) by the Act of Uniformity. The bishops who 
had been intruded into sees by Mary’s authority were 
turned out when they refused to take the oath of 
supremacy. The bishops who had been unlawfully 
turned out returned to their sees, and steps were at 
once taken to fill the many vacancies due to death and 
> age Matthew Parker, head of Corpus Christi 
College, Cambridge, a learned and moderate man, after 


54 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


being canonically elected by the chapter, was consecrated 
archbishop of Canterbury on December 17, 1559, in the 
chapel of Lambeth Palace, by Barlow, bishop of Bath and 
Wells, Scory, bishop of Chichester, Coverdale, bishop of 
Exeter, and Hodgkin, suffragan-bishop of Thetford. 
The first two of these had themselves been consecrated 
under Henry vi., the others under Edward vi. Thus, 
as Pole had been lawfully consecrated to succeed 
Cranmer, Parker was lawfully consecrated to succeed 
Pole, the vacancies having occurred in each case by 
death. The form of consecration used was English, 
but taken directly from the pontifical (or office-book 
for consecration of bishops) used before the Reforma- 
tion. 

Parker, after his consecration, consecrated eleven 
bishops to the vacant sees. The State now took in 
hand the enforcement of uniformity, and the securing 
of assent to the royal supremacy. ‘Though now a great 
number of the clergy had been appointed under Mary 
in accordance with papal rules, bas were very few 
objectors. Out of over nine thousand clergy, not more 
than two hundred were deprived for refusal to accept the 
reformation directed by Elizabeth and Parker. It seemed 
at first as if religious peace was probable. The vast 
majority of clergy and laity joyfully accepted the 
changes which gave English services and freedom to 
the National Church. The king of Spain, husband of 
the late queen, was anxious to ally with Elizabeth. 
Even the pope was not anxious to break with England. 

Years were now spent in a careful and thorough 
preparation of articles and formularies for the Church. 
The XXXIX Articles, reduced and revised from the XLII 
put out under Edward vi., were issued in 1571; and 
while definitely rejecting Roman errors such as the 
plural ‘sacrifices of masses,’ held fast to the ancient 
Catholic doctrine and the authority of the Church in 
controversies of faith. ‘The Homilies (to be read when 
the minister did not preach an original sermon) were 
published in the same year, and upheld the same 
doctrinal standards. 

But before long the Church was beset by two serious 


THE REFORMATION 50 


dangers, the one chiefly religious, the other largely 
caused by politics. The bishops ordered by canon (a 
legal enactment for the Church) that preachers should 
teach nothing but what was agreeable to the Scriptures, 
and had been collected therefrcm by ‘the Catholic fathers 
and ancient bishops.’ But there was a strong party, fed 
largely from Scotland, Germany, and Switzerland, where 
many English Churclimen had found refuge during the 
persecution of Mary, which wished, like ‘the reformers 
of those countries, to make a complete breach with the 
past, to make a new Church, to break the succession. 
This party was represented even among the bishops. 
Calvin, the greatest constructive theologian among the 
reformers, supplied a system which was easily learned 
and was attractive in its logical coherence to the scholars 
of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Objection 
was raised by many to the use of the ancient vestments 
as prescribed under Edward vi., and now again by 
Elizabeth's Prayer Book. A party grew up, called the 
Puritans, who objected both to the doctrine and discipline 
of the Church. Some of the parish priests were content 
with the minimum of conformity, and some with actual 
disobedience to the Church rules. In 1566, Parker put 
out a book of Advertisements, by which he insisted on 
the use ofthe surplice in all churches, and of the cope 
in cathedrals, but did not mention the further vestments 
required by the Prayer Book. This did not satisfy the 
Puritans. They were largely represented in Parliament 
and among the queen’s advisers. Constant attempts 
were made to alter the constitution of the Church, but 
the queen always interfered to prevent them.  Pres- 
byterian customs sprang up in different parts of the 
country, but in 1577 Elizabeth and the bishops sup- 
pressed the ‘prophesyings’ or religious meetings of a 
Puritan cast. 

While this difficulty was engrossing the attention of 
queen, Parliament, and bishops, a still more serious 
danger arose from the determination at length arrived 
at by the papacy to have no peace with England. As 
Mary queen of Scots, banished from her kingdom, took 
refuge in England and became a centre of political ‘plots, 


Dia aah. & 
56 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


as Philip of Spain gave up the idea of an English alliance 
and began a deadly war against English commerce, the 
new pope, Pius V., determined to reconquer England 
for the papacy. In 1570 he excommunicated Elizabeth, 
declared her deposed from her throne, and directed Spain 
and France to turn her out from her dominions. A 
religious mission, taken up by the new order of the 
Jesuits in 1581, filled England with emissaries, religious — 
and political. Plots were constant, many of them 
directed against the queen's life: expeditions to Ireland ~ 
were fostered. Elizabeth’s subjects were alarmed. Those 
who dared not repudiate the pope, and those who were 
converted to Romanism by the missionaries, were believed, 
sometimes with justice, to be traitors, and Parliament 
passed severe and cruel laws against them. Some Roman 
missionaries were executed, and fines were levied upon 
recusants, i.e. those who would not conform to the 
National Church. It was an age of severity and of 
danger. The crisis was the coming of the Spanish 
Armada in 1588 to conquer England and to set up th 
pope’s power again. : 
The National Church came triumphantly out of these 
dangers. All classes rallied loyally round the State at 
the time of the Spanish attack, and even the Roman 
Catholics (i.e. the party which after 1570 refused to 
accept the English Church any more and clung to the 
pope of Rome) fought to preserve the kingdom from 
the foreigners. But the crown and the Church stood 
together, and the defeat of the Armada meant that the 
English Church would never again be at the merey of 
a foreign power. In like manner the Puritans failed to 
influence the nation as a whole, because it was felt that 
their system of Church government came from abroad, 
and their rule of life was narrow and opposed to the 
broad sympathy with all human life and work, as the 
gift of God, which was the inspiring force of the great 
literature of the age. The great writers of Elizabeth’s 
day, in spite of many temptations to which they too 
often yielded, were at heart profoundly religious men, 
and had a sincere faith in the power of God and the love 
of His Son. History, poetry, and the drama all turned 


THE REFORMATION | 87 


their arms against Puritanism, and we shall see hereafter 
that a great theological writer arose to complete their 
work. 

The defeat of the Armada left England with many 
perils, but the great queen was secure in the affections of 
her people, and the Church was rising year by year in 
learning and efficiency, and was firmly fixed, as it had 
been five centuries before, as the greatest of national 
institutions. 

The last years of Elizabeth’s reign were marked by a 
long controversy. The Puritans had won considerable 
influence at the universities, and Dr. Thomas Cartwright, 
Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, published 
books in ‘which he sketched an entire Presbyterian 
organisation for the Church of England. In 1580, an 
attempt was made to introduce this into England by 
means of committees of Puritan clergy (called classes) 
in each district. 

More violent members of the party wrote the Martin 
Marprelate Tracts, a series of disgraceful libels directed 
against the bishops, whom they attacked in gross lan- 
guage, and Episcopacy, which they declared to be an 
invention of Satan. Such language alienated many and 
strengthened the Church among the educated classes. 
In 1585, Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, issued a 
code of canons which conciliated some of the Puritans. 
The authors of the tracts were prosecuted, and one was 
even put to death by the State. Cartwright himself 
was imprisoned for refusing the new oath enforced by 
the Court of High Commission. 

In measures such as these lay the greatest danger for 
the Church. Parliament had given the crown power 
to establish a Court of High Commission, through which 
it was expected that the bishops with lay assistance 
would exercise their power of control over the clergy 
more expeditiously and successfully than through their 
own lawful episcopal courts. The High Commission, 
sitting in different parts of the country under this State 
authority, examined, suspended, and deposed clergy who 
refused to perform the services as directed in the Prayer 
Book, or who disobeyed the bishops. Such methods have 


58 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


never been successful in England, and a strong feeling was 
fostered against the bishops who were forced by the 
Council to carry them out. 

But it this resort to the secular arm was full of future 
danger, there was strong support for the Church in 
the creation of a school of learned and Catholic English 
theologians. During the first stress of the Reformation, 
English writers had been mainly concerned to defend 
the Church against the special doctrines and claims of 
the Roman See. ‘Thus Cranmer had attacked all 
medieval teaching unsparingly, and very many of his 
colleagues assumed a strongly Protestant position. But 
Bishop Jewell, though he was himself opposed to much 
that was of Catholic use, as early as 1562, in his Apology, 
claimed that the English Church had ‘returned to the 
primitive Church of the ancient Fathers and Apostles.’ 
When the Puritan attacks began to be directed against 
the Church’s system, a series of writers arose who based 
upon a deep study of the Holy Scripture and ancient 
authors a reasoned defence of the reformed Church of 
England. Bancroft in i589 proved Episcopacy to be of 
the essence of the Church. In 1593, Bilson clearly ex- 
plained the doctrine of Apostolic succession, and the 
perpetual government of Christ’s Church by 2 ministry 
having its commission from Christ. In 1594, Richard 
Hooker published his ‘ Ecclesiastical Polity,’ a convincing 
refutation of the Puritan claim, and a magnificent vindi- 
cation of the reasoning powers of man in relation to 
the mysteries of God and the order of the Church. 
Hooker clearly declared that the English Church 
separated from Roman Catholics only in their errors, 
and admitted them to be ‘of the family of Jesus 
Christ.’ His book is the greatest theoretical defence 
of the English Church that exists. Here and there 
it is timid in positive statement, and it is always ex- 
tremely deliberate, unexaggerated, and judicious; but 
the principles on which it is written—the reliance upon 
God's revelation, upon the Divine guidance of the 
Chureh, and upon the enlightened reason of man-— 
are those on which the Church has always founded her 
best claim to justification before the conscience and the 


THE REFORMATION 59 


judgment of humanity. Hooker was recognised to 
have entirely refuted Cartwright. He was followed by 
theologians as learned if not so widely influential. Dean 
Field of Gloucester, when he described the continuity of 
the Church, defended Englishmen as belonging to the 
Church ‘wherein all our fathers lived, longing to see 
things brought to their first beginnings again,’ and not 
to any body founded at the Reformation. Bramhall, 
archbishop of Armagh, completed the circle of defenders 
when he declared on behalf of the National Church, ‘1 
have not the least doubt that the Church of England before 
the Reformation, and the Church of England after the 
Reformation, are as much the same Church as a garden 
before it is weeded and after it is weeded is the same 
garden.’ ‘This school of writers became even stronger 
under the Stewarts. At Elizabeth’s death it had vindi- 
cated the position which she had always striven to 
maintain for the National Church. 

In 1603 the great queen died, and her successor, James 
VI. of Scotland, came from a land where the Reformation 
seemed to have run wild. After the abolition of 
Episcopacy, while Mary queen of Scots still reigned, 
men had been appointed to hold the bishoprics without 
consecration and without jurisdiction. ‘These titular 
bishops were abolished in 1592 by the Scots Parliament, 
and Presbyterianism was fully established. ‘The power 
that had been given to the bishops was expressly re- 
pealed, presentations to benefices were made subject 
to the control of the presbyteries, and the “‘ full liberties, 
privileges, and immunities of the Church” were ratified. 
General Assemblies were also allowed to meet once a year, 
or oftener on emergency, the time and place being fixed 
by the king or his commissioner.’ ‘The system now 
established exercised severe repression upon individuals, 
and ruled those who were not strong enough to resist 
with a rod of iron. Mary’s young son, James vi., taught 
by one of the greatest scholars of the age, George 
Buchanan, soon began to study and think for himself, 
and he set himself to restore the stolen endowments of 
the churches and the Episcopal government which was 
everywhere characteristic of the Church of Christ. He 


z > 


60 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


knew, like S. Ignatius of old, that where a bishop was, 
there was the Church. 

In 1597 James held an Assembly at Perth, which he 
induced to place more power in his hands. He restored 
the titular bishops, and when he became king of England 
he pushed on the restoration of Church order by 2 
renewal of communion with the English Church. Andrew 
Melville, the strongest and ablest of the Presbyterian 
ministers, the successor of Knox as leader of the Refor- 
mation, was imprisoned. With his departure to France 
Presbyterianism visibly decayed. An Assembly at Glas- 
gow revived large powers for the bishops, and finally on 
October 21, 1610, three Scottish titular bishops—Spottis- 
woode of Glasgow, Lamb of Brechin, and Hamilton of 
Galloway—vwere consecrated in London by English bishops. 
They consecrated ten other bishops, and Scotland again 
had the ‘historic Episcopate.’ 

It is sometimes thought that the Church of England 
recognised the validity of Presbyterian orders by the 
ordination of Spottiswoode, Lamb, and Hamilton, who 
were consecrated although they had never been or- 
dained priests before being ordained bishops. But the 
argument overlooks the fact that the greater rank 
includes the lesser, and that the Church recognises the 
validity of an ordination to the rank of bishop even if 
the candidate has not been previously ordained a priest. 
S. Ambrose was ordained bishop without being ordained 
priest, and other historical instances are recorded. 

The bishops did not interfere with the machinery of 
Presbyterian government, such as the Kirk-Sessions, 
Presbyteries, Synods, and General Assemblies which 
the Scottish Protestants had instituted in imitation of 
the French. There seemed to be no reason why such 
institutions should not continue to exist: they were 
not necessarily uncatholic, and, though not national 
in their origin, were capable of proving useful to the 
nation. 

Public opinion in Scotland was divided as to the intro- 
duction of Episcopacy. The great body of the people 
were indifferent, the nobles were not unfavourable, and 
the majority of the ministers seem to have been in 


THE REFORMATION 61 


favour of Episcopacy, except in certain strongholds of 
Presbyterianism in the south of Scotland. 

In 1618 an Assembly at Perth, under the archbishop of 
S. Andrews, accepted, by a great majority, Five Articles 
framed in antagonism to Presbyterian innovations. The 
articles were: (1) Kneeling at the Holy Communion ; (2) 
Private Communion in cases of sickness; (3) Private 
Baptism in similar cases ; (4) Confirmation cf children 
by the bishop; (5) Religious observance of Christmas, 
Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Whitsunday. 
These innocent regulations met with the same opposition 
as that which was directed by the Puritans against the 
rules of the Church in England. 


CHAPTER V 
THE CHURCH UNDER THE STEWARTS 


Tue first and most important work of the Church under 
the new king from Scotland was the confirmation of the 
faith against Calvinism. The king himself had leanings 
towards some of the views of the great French reformer, 
and sent English clergy to the synod of the Dutch 
Reformed Church at Dort in 1619, but the English 
Church was in no way committed to its decision on the 
Calvinist doctrine of Predestination. A conference had 
been held at Lambeth some years before under Arch- 
bishop Whitgift, in which a series of articles, called 
the ‘Lambeth Articles,’ strongly influenced by Calvin's 
teaching, were prepared. But both Queen Elizabeth 
aud the Church as a whole were strongly opposed to 
them, and they never received any legal sanction. 
Immediately on James’s accession, a number of clergy 
presented a petition, called the Millenary petition 
(because it was supposed to represent the wishes of a 
thousand ministers). This asked for the abolition of 
the surplice, of the giving of the ring in marriage, and 
of the use of the cross in baptism. It represented 
the Puritan opinion which Hooker had refuted, and a 
conference held at Hampton Court decided to make no 
important alterations in the Prayer Book. 

The school of Hooker was succeeded by a school of still 
more learned men. Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, 
fitly called in his day the ‘light of the Christian world,’ 
by theological treatises, sermons, and the constant 
teaching and practice of his holy life, confirmed the 
Church, as against all schismatics, in resistance to Rome 

62 


THE CHURCH UNDER THE STEWARTS 63 


and reliance on the Holy Scriptures and the teaching 
of the undivided Church. Many learned bishops and 
clergy followed in his way, and the Church became 
well known throughout Europe for her learning, and 
was joined by men of erudition, once Romanists or 
Protestants, from abroad, such as Marco Antonio de 
Dominis, archbishop of Spalato, who took part in the 
consecration of several English bishops, and the famous 
jsaac Casaubon, the most learned man of his day. ‘The 
Hampton Court conference brought about the revision 
of the earlier translations of the Bible, and the issue in 
1611 of the version which has been authorised for use from 
that day to this. Gradually, first Cambridge and then 
Oxford threw off the Calvinist teaching, and when in 
1621 William Laud, President of S. Jolin’s College, the 
leader of the Oxford Catholic party, became Bishop of 
S. David's, it seemed that the maintenance of the 
teaching of the Prayer Book was assured. 

James 1. died in 1625. In 162% Laud became bishop 
of Bath and Wells, in 1628 bishop of London, in 1633 
archbishop of Canterbury. He was by far the strongest 
primate who had ruled in England since the Middle 
Ages, and he set himself to reform the Church in all 
matters in which it needed improvement. By his advice 
the declaration still found in our Prayer Books was 
prefixed to the XXXIX Articles, declaring that they should 
be taken in the plain and grammatical sense, and thus 
preventing Calvinist or anti-Catholic interpretations. 
Till 1640 he was responsible for all appointments to 
bishoprics, and he filled them with men who held the 
opinions of the English Church to be agreeable to those 
of ‘the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops.’ ‘The 
universities accepted his guidance. He won back many 
from Rome, among them William Chillingworth, who 
wrote a famous hook on The Religion of Protestants. 
Saintly men like George Herbert, a courtier of ancient 
family and a scholar of high position at Cambridge, 
who wrote The Temple, and A Priest to the Temple, 
took holy orders under his influence. The ‘ religious’ 
life was revived in the English Church by the family 
of Nicholas Ferrar, once M.P. for Lymington, at Little 


64 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


Gidding in Huntingdonshire. The Catholic tion of 
the English Church as opposed to Rome, but Protestant 
only against her errors, was confirmed by the writings 
of Laud himself, of Jeremy Taylor, of Mountagu, and 
other bishops and clergy. Public worship in many 
places had fallen into slovenly ways: the ‘holy tables’ 
were sometimes in the naves of the churches (as had 
often been the case before the Reformation, when there 
were many chapels with separate dedications of the 
altars), and the ‘ high altar’ had ceased to exist; undue 
importance was attached to preaching, much less than 
due importance to the Sacraments (though there were 
large numbers of communicants). Laud reformed all 
this, often in the face of much opposition. The holy 
tables were ordered in all cases to remain at the east 
end. Sermons were only to be preached after the 
Church services had been read in the parish churches. 
A strict investigation was made of the performance of 
their obligations by a by cathedral bodies, and 
by parish priests. In all this Laud had the strong 
support of King Charles I., who was a devoted and 
instructed son of the Church. 

But the vices of the Reformation Pps still 
hampered good work. The bishops could not act freely, 
but were obliged to use the unconstitutional Court of 
High Commission, which by authority from Parliament 
had been set up to carry out the royal supremacy. The 
king was in constant trouble from foreign polities, from 
want of money, from Irish difficulties. e statesmen 
around him advised him to arbitrary and unconstitutional 
courses. The Puritans won new influence and joined the 
constitutional opponents of the Crown. The revival of 
the Church’s activity was resented by rich gentlemen and 
city merchants who lived careless lives. A strong party, 
formed of very different classes of men, opposed the 
Church as well as the crown in Parliament. Charles’s 
power broke down on every side. The beginning of 
troubles was in Scotland. He had tried like his father 
to restore adequate endowments to the Scottish clergy: 
this alienated the nobility. He had caused the Scots 
bishops to draw up a service-book, which was published 


THE CHURCH UNDER THE STEWARTS 65 


in December 1636, and to wear surplices and vestments: 
this irritated national feeling and alarmed the Protestant © 
opinions of the people. It was thought that Charles and 
Laud were trying to force the English Church upon the 
Scots people. A rebellion broke out in 1637 which 
destroyed the Church government, set up Presbyterianism 
again, and bound the majority of the Scots people to a 
‘Solemn League and Covenant’ in its support. All the 
fourteen bishops were deposed, and eight of them were 
‘excommunicated,’ a sentence which carried with it the 
loss of every civil right. Charles was unable to with- 
stand the movement, and it greatly strengthened the 
English opposition to his rule. 

The Scottish revolution set fire to the English dis- 
content. Laud struggled bravely to the last. Canons 
(by whick the clergy are still bound) had been passed in 
1604: new canons were passed in 1640. This was the 
last act of his power. The Long Parliament, from 1640, 
with constantly diminishing majorities, destroyed the 
ancient constitution in Church and State. The Church 
was disestablished and Presbyterianism was set up in its 
place. 

With the triumph of Parliament and the evident 
approach of a conflict in the State, the power over the 
Church passed into the hands of the House of Commons. 
Laud was impeached, December 18, 1640, and sent to the 
Tower. Committees were appointed which turned many 
of his school from their livings, destroyed ornaments and 
painted glass in churches, and prepared the destruction 
of the established form of Church government. Petitions 
came in against Episcopacy, and were met by others 
urging that no change should be made. But the 
strongest party in the House considered the bishops to 
be supporters of the king’s arbitrary government: they 
were excluded from the House of Lords, and finally 
several of them were imprisoned. In 1641 the Court 
of High Commission was abolished. In 1648 Episcopacy 
was abolished, and the Commons came to agreement with 
the Scots and took the Solemn League and Covenant. 
An Assembly of Puritan divines, English and Scots, 
met at Westminster, and drew up a new book of public 

E 


66 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


worship (the Directory, set forth 1645), a form of 
Church government (Presbyterianism was established 
by law, 1646), and a Calvinist confession of faith and 
catechisms (which are still used by the Presbyterians in 
Scotland). The clergy were ejected from their livings 
because they would not give up the Prayer Book, and 
Presbyterian ministers took their places. 

Before all these changes had been carried out, Laud 
was executed, though he had not been found guilty at 
his trial. He was beheaded on Tower Hill, January 
10, 1645, declaring to the last that he had always been 
loyal to the Church of England. He had prevented the 
English Church being narrowed into Calvinism: he had 
always upheld a large liberty of belief among Church- 
men: he had trained the men who were to bring back 
the Church and restore her lawful order fifteen years 
after his death. 

During these years the Church of England was outside 
the protection of the law. It was illegal to use the 
Prayer Book, to observe Christmas Day, to be married 
by any one but a justice of the peace. The clergy for 
the most part lived in poverty and concealment, teaching 
children or acting as chaplains in private houses. Some 
conformed to the new establishment. But Presbyterian- 
ism was never popular in England. Its system was too 
rigid and too searching for ordinary men, its theology 
was too cruel and narrow. When Oliver Cromwell came 
to power, the chief influence in religion fell into the 
hands of the Independents, a republican party in Church 
and State, who allowed each congregation practically to 
choose its own teaching. A Committee of Triérs was 
appointed in 1654 to license ministers, and other Com- 
mittees were given power to turn out those who were 
considered insufficient. These powers were interpreted 
widely, and thus the benefices and churches began to 
pass into the hands of the Independents, the predecessors 
of the modern Congregationalists. Puritanism was 
supreme, and outwardly England was coerced into strict — 
and sombre submission. 

At first sight it might seem that politics disestablished 
the Church, and politics restored it. But this is not 


THE CHURCH UNDER THE STEWARTS 67 


the whole truth. There was an intense moral force in 
Puritanism, an intense belief in literal obedience to the 
Bible as interpreted by Calvinists, a passionate revolt 
against the order and system of the ancient and reformed 
Church. But when Puritanism came into power, it was 
found unable to convert the souls of men more surely 
than the old religion, as it was unable to replace the 
Prayer Book in their affections. Milton, the greatest of 
Puritan writers, found that ‘new presbyter was but old 
priest writ large’; Englishmen in general revolted 
against a sternness which seemed to them to be hypo- 
critical; everywhere there was confusion where there 
might have been peace. Presbyterians themselves came 
to prefer the Church to Independency. The new forms 
of Church government were tried and found wanting, 
and the people welcomed back with acclamations, in 1660, 
the Church as well as the king. The bishops who still 
survived at the Restoration returned to their sees. They 
had most of them been trained by Laud, and they were 
all of them imbued with his attachment to the Church 
and her ancient order. Juxon, his lifelong friend, who as 
bishop of London had attended King Charles 1. on the 
scaffold, became archbishop of Canterbury. Other men of 
learning and judgment were appointed to the vacant sees. 

From 1660 to 1662 the constitution of the English Church 
received what was in many respects its final settlement. 
The clergy who had been ejected since 1645 were 
restored to their livings, by Act of Parliament. By the 
same power the bishops were restored to the House of 
Lords, and the property of the cathedrals, bishoprics, 
and parishes was restored to them. A conference was 
held in London, at the Savoy, to discuss the differences 
between the Puritans and the Church. This served to 
make clear how fundamental were the differences which 
separated them. The Puritans demanded the withdrawal 
from the Prayer Book of many statements of historic 
Christian teaching (scch as the regeneration of baptized 
infants, forms of confirmation, ordination, and the like), 
and of ceremonies (such as kneeling, and the sign of the 
cross) connected with that teaching, and of the vestments 
ordered by the Ornaments rubric (see p. 55) since the time 


ie) LA wD @ 
: ¢ oh 


68 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


of Elizabeth. It was found impossible to combine the 
opposite opinions, and the result was a division which 
lasts to this day. 

The Restoration settlement was completed by a final 
revision of the Prayer Book by the Conyocations, assented 
to by the king, and made law by Act of Parliament. 
Considerable alterations were made by the revisers, and 
they were all in the direction of simplicity, with 
emphasis on ancient customs and usages (as in the 
more frequent use of the word ‘ priest,’ the addition of 
a table of fasts, of several names to the Calendar, and 
the revision of the instruction on the Sacraments in the 
Catechism). The rubric requiring the use of the vest- 
ments in use by the authority of Parliament in the 
second year of Edward vr. was, in spite of the Puritan 
objection and discussion, retained, with no reference to 
these vestments ever having been disused. 

The Restoration settlement was the work of men 
such as those who all along had guided the Church 
through her long period of reformation. Everything 
which seemed to belong to the primitive doctrine of 
the Church was reasserted, and all such ancient and 
beautiful customs, or ritual, as had not been degraded 
or misrepresented through superstitious use, were re- 
tained. ; 

In her relation to the State the Church remained as 
of old. The only change was that by an agreement 
between Sheldon, Juxon’s successor as archbishop of 
Canterbury, and Lord Chancellor Clarendon, the right 
of the clergy to tax themselves separately in their con- 
vocations was given up. 

We have next to trace the effects of this final settle- 
ment upon the religion of the country. 

The Restoration settlement recognised, what had long 
been a fact, that there were a number of dissenters, besides 
the Roman Catholics, who did not conform to the worshi 
or accept the doctrines of the English Church. Chure 
writers had pleaded for toleration for them. Oliver 
Cromwell, though he had given no toleration to English 
Churchmen or Romanists, had preserved the freedom of 
all sorts of Protestant nonconformists. Charles u. had 


—_s- 


THE CHURCH UNDER THE STEWARTS 69 


promised and wished to grant freedom of worship. But 
the majority of lay people in 1662 were in no mood for 
toleration of any form of dissent. Parliament considered 
that nonconformists were a danger to the State. The 
connection between religion and politics in the Civil War 
could not be forgotten. The State seemed to require the 
support of a national Church, and the House of Commons 
considered that it could best support both State and Church 
by persecuting those whom it believed to be dangerous. 
The result of the Acts now passed was to turn all non- 
conformists into separated bodies of dissenters. 

The first and necessary step after the issue of the 
revised Prayer Book was to require all clergy to use it. 
That it should be duly used, it was necessary that all 
ministers should receive ordination from a bishop. Thus 
all those—Independents, Presbyterians, and members of 
many new sects (such as Quakers)—who would not accept 
the orders of the Apostolic Ministry or use the Book of 
Common Prayer, had of necessity to retire from their 
benefices and endowments. This was inevitable and right. 
But it was not right, though it was inevitable in the state 
of feeling of the vast majority of Englishmen, that the 
dissenters should suffer persecution. It was the result 
of the age-long custom which the State had never aban- 
doned. As the Parliament of Henry 1v. had punished the 
Lollards, as Henry vi. had punished those who refused 
to accept the royal supremacy, as Mary had killed those 
who would not accept the doctrine of Transubstantiation, 
and Elizabeth those who upheld the jurisdiction of the 
pope, as Oliver Cromwell proscribed and imprisoned 
Churchmen and Romanists, so the Parliaments of Charles 
n., wildly enthusiastic for the preservation of the Consti- 
tution in Church and State, passed laws, as their passion or 
fear dictated, against all dissenters from the established 
order. Four Acts in particular must be mentioned. 

The Act of Uniformity (1661) not enly enforced the 
use of the Prayer Book, but required all lay folk to 
attend the Church services under pain of imprisonment. 
The Corporation Act (1661) excluded dissenters from 
municipal office. The Conventicle Act (1664) forbade 
all meeting for worship apart from the church under 


70 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


harsh penalties. The Five Mile Act (1665) obliged all 
dissenting ministers either to take an oath not to attempt 
to alter the Constitution in Church or State, or not to 
come within five miles of a town. All these were 
dictated by fear of a new revolution of Protestant 
sectaries ; and even before they were in force country 
magistrates arrested and imprisoned dissenting preachers, 
as they arrested in 1660 John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s 
Progress is the greatest of English allegories. Romanist 
dissenters were no less feared than Protestants. The 
Test Act (1673) was passed in terror of the Roman 
Catholics, when a pretended Popish Plot to murder the 
king and the chief officers of State was imposed on 
the credulity of Parliament and people by the knavery 
of a renegade named Titus Oates. This Act declared 
that no man could hold any military or civil office 
unless he received the Holy Communion according to 
the use of the Church of England, and signed a declara- 
tion against Transubstantiation. The object of all these 
Acts was to carry out the popular will, that those who 
ruled the country or served the State should be members 
of the National Church, and it was believed that only 
such would accept her Sacraments. The test seemed 
the simplest that could be thought of. But it proved 
that there were unconscientious dissenters; and men 
profaned the most sacred ordinance of religion by making 
it ‘a picklock to a place.’ The only safeguard against 
sacrilege was the requirement of the Prayer Book that 
no notorious evil-liver should be admitted to communion 
with the Church; and the charity or timidity of the 
clergy forbade the frequent enforcement of this rule. 
Charles was always anxious to give toleration. He 
issued a Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 suspending 
all penalties against dissenters, but Parliament declared 
it illegal. He was himself desirous to unite the English 
Church with Rome, and his ambassadors obtained 
schemes for allowing the services to be in English and 
the clergy to be married; but the Church was not con- 
cerned in the negotiation, and Charles, after drawing 
nearer and nearer to the religion of his mother, his 
brother, and his sister, promised the French king, 





THE CHURCH UNDER THE STEWARTS 71 


Louis x1v., by the secret treaty of Dover in 1670, to 
declare himself a Romanist, and in 1685 died in the 
communion of Rome. 

James 1. had been a Roman Catholic for many years, 
and though at first he promised to maintain the Church, - 
he soon began, almost without concealment, to try to 
bring back the pope’s authority. He claimed a power 
to dispense with the laws in certain cases, appointed 
Roman Catholics to posts in the army, and even to 
offices in the universities which could only lawfully be 
held by clergy of the English Church. He attempted to 
win over the dissenters to his side by issuing a new 
declaration suspending all the penal laws, and he ordered 
that it should be read in all churches.  Sancroft, 
archbishop of Canterbury, with six bishops, petitioned 
the king against his illegal command. The petition was 
declared by James to be a libel ; and the archbishop, with 
Bishops Ken (Bath and Wells), Lake (Chichester), Lloyd 
(S. Asaph), Trelawney (Bristol), Turner (Ely), and White 
(Peterborough), were tried for their courageous act. 
They were acquitted, and the whole nation rejoiced 
with the Church which had again championed the 
national liberties. 

Within a few weeks James fled at the approach of 
William of Orange, who had married his daughter Mary, 
and the crown was conferred on them as king and 
queen. This was the Revolution of 1688. 

In Scotland the measures of Charles mu. and James 11. 
had also prepared a revolution. In 1661 the Scots 
Episcopacy was restored by the Scots Parliament, the 
Rescissory Act repealing all the legislation of the last 
twenty-one years. Bishops were consecrated to fill the 
vacant sees, James Sharp, who had been a prominent 
Presbyterian, being appointed to the primatial see of 
S. Andrews. It is said that he ‘did more harm to Epis- 
copacy by adopting it than he did to Presbytery by 
deserting it.’ He encouraged the severest measures 
against the Covenanters, and involved the Church in the 
odium caused by the repressive measures of the State. 

The restoration of Episcopacy was welcomed in the 
north of Scotland, but disliked in the south and west. 


72 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


The Prayer Book was not enforced, and it appears that 
many of the ministers had not received Episcopal ordi- 
nation, and many lost their benefices by refusing to admit 
the lawfulness of Episcopacy. Still nearly six hundred 
ministers conformed to the Church. But soon the Parlia- 
ment passed Acts as severe as the English Acts against 
dissenters, and a Mile Act even more stringent than the 
English was put in force. Rebellions broke out in the 
south and west. These were followed by still more 
severe measures. Some Covenanters murdered Arch- 
bishop Sharp in 1679. Archbishop Leighton, the most 
saintly of the prelates, resigned his see in despair at 
being unable to carry any compromise or to prevent the 
persecution. ‘The battle of Bothwell Brig, 1679, in which 
the Covenanters were defeated, was followed by an 
attempt to pacify the dissenters by an Indemnity Act. 
But the endeavours to enforce the Royal Supremacy 
caused dissatisfaction on all sides, and the end of Charles 
m.’s reign left the Church in confusion and the nation 
almost at war. James u. tried to set up Romanism, and 
the bishops who opposed him were ier When the 
king fled, the south rose against the clergy. More than 
two hundred incumbents were ‘rabbled’ (turned out of 
their houses and ill-treated). In July 1689, Episcopacy 
was disestablished, mainly,.it would seem, because the 
bishops and many of the clergy refused to take the oaths 
to the new government. Presbyterianism was legally 
established in 1690, and has remained im power ever 
since. 

The bishops and clergy lost their position partly 
through the staunch Protestantism of the south, partly 
through their loyalty to the Stewarts. For many years 
they and their flocks formed the majority of the people. 
They were subjected to severe persecution, which in 
the end was successful, and within fifty years of the 
Revolution Scotland had become outwardly a nation of 
Presbyterians. 

The Revolution of 1688, which told so harshly against 
the Church in Scotland, might have been expected to 
benefit the English Church. It was the attack on the 


Church more than anything else which had lost James um. 





THE CHURCH UNDER THE STEWARTS 73 


his crown. The Seven Bishops were felt to be the 
defenders of the liberty of the people even more than of 
the Church. But the new king was a Dutch Calvinist, 
and, though a man of bad life, was a strong Protestant. 
His wife, Queen Mary, was much attached to the saintly 
Ken, who had been her chaplain, but William would not 
tolerate reproof, and so kept the best of the clergy at a 
distance. The Whig party, which had most influence 
with him, was not inclined to support the Church ; and 
many of the clergy believed that it was their duty to 
remain loyal to the exiled king. This caused the schism 
of the non-jurors. The State required an oath of alle- 
giance to the new sovereigns. Archbishop Sancroft, five 
of the bishops (four of whom had been among the famous 
Seven), and over four hundred clergy, besides many laity, 
considered that they could not break from their allegiance 
toJames. The non-juring clergy were ejected from their 
cures and the bishops from their sees. Sancroft and 
Ken, two of the most saintly bishops by whom the 
Church of England has ever been ruled, died in retire- 
ment. A schism was caused which seriously threatened 
the stability of the Church. The non-jurors split among 
themselves, but still continued to consecrate and ordain, . 
and to keep apart from the National Church, till the last 
of their bishops died in 1805. 

The majority of the clergy and bishops accepted the 
change of government, rightly believing that the duty 
of the Church was to minister to the people without 
concerning herself with political changes. But William 
distrusted the clergy as High Churchmen and Tories. 
He endeavoured to pass a Comprehension Bill, to admit 
dissenters to the Church, but the Church party was still 
by far the most numerous in Parliament, and the House 
of Commons refused to make any changes without the 
consent of Convocation, a constitutional act which again 
saved the Church from the arbitrary power of the Crown. 
A Toleration Act was however passed which gave freedom 
of worship to Protestant but not to Romanist dis- 
senters. The rule of the Church passed into the hands 
of bishops who were in favour with the king, and of 
moderate opinions, such as Tillotson, archbishop of 


74 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


Canterbury, and Burnet, bishop of Salisbury. A sharp 
contention occurred between the Lower House of the 
Convocation of Canterbury and the bishops; and the 
Church of England, deserted by some of her best 
children, seemed in great peril. 

None the less, the reign of William III. was a time of 
great spiritual activity. It was the time of the foundation 
of the great religious societies which have done such 
magnificent work for the Church at home and abroad, 
and from which so many other organisations for good 
works have sprung. The Society for Promoting Christian 
Knowledge was founded in 1698, the Society for the 
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701, and 
within the same period many societies for the reformation 


of public morals were begun and did good work. It was. 


an age also of good books. Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living 
and Holy Dying were popular among all classes. The 
Whole Duty of Man was a religious book published 
anonymously which had an enormous sale for many 
years. Cosin’s Devotions were used, and Comber helped 
to the understanding of the Book of Common Prayer. 
From this time to the middle of the eighteenth century 
the supply of good devotional books, besides many works 
of controversy with Romanist and Protestant dissenters, 
never ceased. Best of all, perhaps, was the work of a 
non-juror, William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and 
Holy Life. 

With the accession of Queen Anne, 1702, the Church 
came once more into favour with the crown. The queen 
was a devout Churchwoman, and told Parliament that 
‘upon all occasions of promotion to any ecclesiastical 
dignity she would have a just regard for those who were 
eminent and remarkable for their piety, learning, and 
constant zeal for the Church.’ In 1704 she gave up to 
the Church the right of the crown to the first-fruits and 
tenths of ecclesiastical benefices (which had at one time 
been paid to the pope, and since 1535 to the crown), thus 
founding the fund for Church purposes which is known 
as Queen Anne's Bounty. 

During Anne’s reign (1702-1714) several attempts 
were made by the House of Commons to remedy 


THE CHURCH UNDER THE STEWARTS 75 


the scandal caused by the evasion of the Test Act. It 
was proposed to prevent ‘ occasional conformity’ (i.e. 
the receiving of the Holy Communion by dissenters once, 
to qualify themselves for office) by requiring more frequent 
communion, as required by the Prayer Book from all 
members of the Church, thus apparently securing that 
only bona-fide Churchmen should hold office under the 
State. Butall the bills passed by the House of Commons 
were rejected by the Lords, and the scandal remained till 
the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828. 
The Church feeling of the House of Commons was shown 
in an exaggerated form by the Lower House of Con- 
vocation, which claimed an independence of the Upper 
House similar to that enjoyed by the House of Commons 
in Parliament. The popular feeling was shown in the 
violent agitation all over the country in favour of 
Dr. Sacheverell, who was impeached by the House of 
Commons in 1710 for a sermon directed against those 
who were ‘resolved to bring the Church into the con- 
venticle,’ and would do ‘by moderation and occasional 
conformity’ what could not be done ‘ by comprehension 
and toleration.’ The strong feeling of the country 
showed itself in Parliament, which in 1713 passed an 
Occasional Conformity Act and a Schism Act, to prevent 
the foundation of schools by dissenters. 

Such bitterness naturally led to a reaction. It was 
feared that the clergy and the Tories would welcome 
back James, son of James 1, even if he would not re- 
nounce Romanism; and when (by the Act of Settlement 
passed under William 11.) George, Elector of Hanover, 
ascended the throne on the death of Anne in 1714, the 
Church passed under the control of those whose chief 
aim was to keep well with the Government. The two 
Acts passed at the end of Anne’s reign were repealed. 
The Convocations were not allowed to sit, and ‘remained 
in a state of suspended animation’ till 1852. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 


Tue eighteenth century was, for the most part, a 
period of deadness in the history of the Church in 
England and in Scotland. In the latter kingdom, now 
united with England by Acts of the two Parliaments 
in 1707, which guaranteed the establishment of Presby- 
terianism, rioting had ‘spread from parish to parish’ 
when attempts were made on the one hand to turn out 
the clergy in districts strongly favourable to Episcopacy, 
and on the other, in Presbyterian districts, to expel the 
last traces of Episcopal order. The bishops and clergy 
begged the help of Gath Anne in ‘the deplorable con- 
dition of the once National Church since the suppression 
of its Apostolic government.’ In 1712 an Act of Parlia- 
ment was at last passed giving freedom of worship to 
‘those of the Episcopal communion in Scotland.’ is 
toleration did not last for long. After the rising of 1715 
in favour of the Stewarts, in which it was believed that 
many members of the Church were implicated, an Act 
was passed making it penal for ‘ Episcopal ministers’ 
to officiate unless they had taken the oaths to the 
Government, and in many cases where they were still in 
possession of parish churches they were turned out and 
imprisoned. At that time they were in a majority in 
Edinburgh, but the severe measures both now and after 
the rising of 1745 brought the Church almost to the 
point of extinction. Not only were many of the chapels 
burned, but an Act was passed which allowed licence to 
minister among the Episcopalians only to those who had 
been ordained by an English or irish bishop, and gave 
76 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 7 


the punishment of perpetual banishment on a second 
offence to any other priest who should perform service. 
The Government plainly intended to destroy the Episcopal 
Church by depriving it of a native priesthood. Its action 
cannot be regarded as purely political. The Scottish 
clergy were told that they would not be allowed to 
officiate unless they had taken oaths of allegiance to the 
Government, but, if they were ready to take the oaths, 
they were informed that the law did not permit them to 
do so unless they had been ordained out of Scotland. 
The laity were included in the penal statutes. Any 
layman attending an illegal ‘meeting-house,’ and not 
giving information of the same within five days, was 
liable to be fined and imprisoned. If a peer were twice 
guilty of the offence, he could not be chosen a repre- 
sentative peer, and a commoner could not exercise the 
franchise. Every building in which five or more persons 
assembled for Episcopal worship was declared to be a 
‘meeting-house.’ 

Various devices were employed for evading these cruel 
laws. In some places, as at Montrose, a building was 
erected with several rooms opening out from a central 
room, and four persons were placed in each apartment 
while divine service was being conducted. Sometimes 
the congregations met in secluded places in the open air, 
or in a lonely cottage so situated as to afford equal 
opportunities for escape and for the observation of an 
approaching enemy. Presbyterian spies assisted the 
execution of the penal laws, and for many years the 
administrations of the Church were attended with great 
danger. The persecution only became successful by 
diminishing the supply of clergy. The people often 
had no liking for Presbyterianism, and as late as 1770 
many hundreds came forward to be confirmed by Bishop 
Robert Forbes when he visited the dioceses of Ross and 
Argyll. 

It is deserving of notice that in spite of the poverty 
of their surroundings, the Scottish Episcopalians were 
often more tenacious of ancient usages and. belief than 
their English brethren, For instance, the sign of the 
cross was used in confirmation at a time when uo bishop 


78 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


of the Church of England used such a ceremony. 
Between the years 1716 and 1723 the Scots bishops, in 
close relation with the English non-jurors, entered into 
negotiations with the Orthodox Churches of the East, 
in Russia and Turkey, with a view to reunion. ‘The 
proposed union was not effected. But a remarkable 
proof of Scottish sympathy with Catholie antiquity and 
the Eastern branch of the Church is to be found in the 
history of the Scottish Communion Office. At the begin- 
ning of the eighteenth century the Scottish Episcopalians 
sometimes employed the English Book of Common 
Prayer, sometimes the Scottish Book first used in 1637. 
Some unfortunate disputes took place a few years later 
with reference to various liturgical prayers and cere- 
monial usages, such as the invocation of the Holy Spirit 
at the consecration of the Eucharist, and the mixing of 
water with the wine. An agreement was made in 1731. 
Soon afterwards, much was done towards a true under- 
standing of the nature of Christian worship when The 
Ancient Liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem by the good and 
learned Bishop Rattray was published. ‘The final result 
of this and similar works was the publication of the 
Communion Office of 1764. ‘This still remains the 
true and peculiar service of the Episcopal Church 
of Scotland. In its close adhesion to the form and 
spirit of the primitive liturgies it is unsurpassed, and 
its intrinsic beauty no less than its association with 
a pathetic history endear it to all whom it has taught 
to pray. 

is England the Church was not persecuted, but every 
effort was made by those in authority to repress zeal, and 
the High Church party were generally treated as if they 
were disloyal. The bishops were often men of learning, 
but they were chosen generally for their services to the 
Government. Many of them but rarely visited their 
sees : Hoadly, the most prominent opponent of the High 
Church party, never visited his bishopric of Bangor 
during the whole time he held it. It was a period of 
much controversial writing, and of some sound moral 
teaching, but the enthusiasm without which religion is 
apt to lose all its power had almost ceased to exist. One 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 79 


great writer at least redeems the Church from the charge 
of universal negligence. Joseph Butler, rector of Stan- 
hope, and afterwards bishop, first of Bristol and then of 
Durham, by his Analogy of Religion (1736) and Sermons, 
and by his zealous discharge of his duties as priest and 
bishop, did much to preserve for the Church the respect 
and devotion of the laity. Besides this, he will always be 
most remembered as the greatest opponent of the English 
Deists of his time. The Deists endeavoured to reduce 
religion to a vague belief in God or a code of respectable 
morality. Some of them lived upon the doctrines which 
they attacked, and assumed as their own, or as the common 
products of human reason, moral principles which they 
derived from Christianity. Others were more fanatical, 
and were justly reproached with desiring to clear away 
everything which they called ‘superstition,’ and building 
nothing upon the vacant site. The number and popu- 
larity of Deistic books published in the first half of 
the eighteenth century proves how low was the estimate 
of religion among men of culture, and the boldness 
with which the Deists expected the fall of Christianity is 
a proof of their temporary success. Butler says, ‘It is 
come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by 
many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a 
subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered 
to be fictitious.” The good bishop did a great deal 
towards dispelling this comfortable delusion of the 
Deists. But withont a general revival of energy the 
Church must have sunk into utter decay. 

The revival came from the noble work of the ‘ Method- 
ists.’ About 1729, the great movement which was to 
transform the Church was started in Oxford. Its chief 
leaders were the brothers John and Charles Wesley, 
and George Whitefield. These reformers lived by strict 
rule, observing all the fasts and festivals of the Church, 
and from the exactness of their devotional method they 
received the nickname which has remained attached to 
their followers. Whitefield became probably the 
greatest popular preacher that the Church of England 
has ever known. After doing a great work of conver- 
sion for many years, he became estranged from the 


80 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


Wesleys through the wild views that he adopted on 
several points of theology. He was ‘a guileless, self- 
denying, but ill-trained and very injudicious enthusiast,’ 
and after separating from Wesley and being coldly treated 
by the bishops, he ended, though no doubt unintention- 
ally, by founding the sect of Calvinistic Methodists, 

Charles Wesley by his beautiful hymns brought back 
love and zeal to the worship of thousands. John Wesley 
by his marvellous ‘awakening’ sermons, and by his 
extraordinary power of influence and organisation, gave 
new energy to the Church, even when her rulers most 
distrusted him. 

At first the noble work of these good men was encouraged 
and blessed by the bishops, but just as the friars in the 
thirteenth century were disliked by the parish priests, 
with whose work (or negligence) they seemed to interfere, 
so in the eighteenth the clergy, often wrongly, but some- 
times with justification, resented the intrusion of the 
itinerant preachers who drew thousands to hear them. 
Gradually the followers of Wesley adopted strange 
views, such as a doctrine of the new birth which denied 
the Prayer Book teaching as to regeneration in baptism, 
and the necessity of personal and conscious assurance of 
salvation. But Wesley himself, though he founded a 
society which was more and more estranged from the 
Church, was in intention always loyal to her. He 
did a work which no man before him since the thir- 
teenth century had done in England. He revived the 
inspiration of personal piety throughout the length and 
breadth of the land, and he brought religion before men 
in a way in which it had long ceased to be brought. 
Force, reality, personal appeal, were the reasons of the 
great revival which, by the power of God through the 
preaching of the Methodists, transformed the religion of 
the country. 

John Wesley died in 1791, without consciously diverg- 
ing from the teaching or the communion of the Chure 
save only in regard to the ministry. In 1784 he laid 
hands on two persons to act as bishops among the 
Methodists of America. Here, and in his later action, he 
separated from the Church. His brother Charles strongly 


: 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 81 


disapproved of his conduct in the matter, and is said to 
have written the following lines : 


How easily are bishops made, 
By man or woman’s whim! 
Wesley his hands on Coke hath laid, 
But who laid hands on him? 


These later developments of the Methodists, which led 
inevitably to dissent, were strongly supported by Selina, 
Countess of Huntingdon, an excellent but somewhat 
violent person, who founded a training college for mini- 
sters, and left her name associated with a sect. 

When Wesley died, his work had reinvigorated the 
Church. A number of holy men who shared his 
opinions, or who had been his associates, spread his 
teaching in the country. Among these were Fletcher, 
vicar of Madeley, Thomas Scott, Walker of Truro, 
Grimshaw of Haworth, Harvey, Romaine, Venn, Top- 
lady, Rowland Hill, John Newton, and Richard Cecil. 
The work of these men in raising the spiritual tone of 
the nation was very great. They were regarded as the 
leaders of a party in the Church which has ever since 
had great influence. The Evangelicals, as they were 
called, attached little importance to the history or tradi- 
tions of the Church, and were strongly opposed to any- 
thing which in the least savoured of Rome. They laid 
greater stress on individual than on corporate religion, 
and they were apt to undervalue teaching which the 
Church of England had carefully preserved throughout 
the period of the Reformation. Of their philanthropic 
energy and religious zeal there could be, and can be, 
no doubt. 

Wesley’s work not only stirred up the Church to new 
life and formed a distinct party within it, but it gave 
fresh vigour to the older dissenting sects, such as the 
Independents or Congregationalists, and after his death 
created a new sect which, contrary to his earnest prayers, 
separated from the Church and became known as the 
Wesleyans. 


CHAPTER VII 
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 


Durine the later years of the eighteenth century, and 
for the first twenty years of the nineteenth, the Evan- 
gelicals were the most prominent members of the Church 
in England. They founded the Religious Tract Society, 
the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the Church 
Missionary Society. Warmly supported by rich families 
like the Gurneys and Buxtons, and championed in the 
House of Commons by the saintly statesman William 
Wilberforce, the bosom friend of the Prime Minister, 
Pitt, they won the abolition of the slave trade, and 
eventually, in 1833, the abolition of slavery itself in 
all British possessions. The last. great name belonging 
especially to their party is that of Charles Simeon, who 
died in 1836, and who had had for over fifty years a 
commanding influence on the religion of Cambridge, 
and had trained hundreds of ministers in the Church 
to reflect his pious life and his semi-Calvinist view. — 
The Church was tending during this period to adopt 
opinions which had been in abeyance since the seven- 
teenth century. A new revival was needed to reinforce 
old teaching. a 

At the end of the last century the Church in Scotland 
seemed to be at a low ebb. ‘I am a member of the © 
suffering and Episcopal Church of Scotland, the shadow — 
of a shade now,’ are words which the greatest of Scottish — 
writers, himself a member of the Church, puts into the 
mouth of one of his characters. ‘The poverty of the 
Church may be illustrated by the fact that in 1783 a 
worthy priest sent to Bishop Petrie a gown which had 

82 













THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ~ 83 


belonged to his predecessor, humbly regretting that he 
had not a piece of cloth which would make it long 
enough to ‘sit decently’ on its new owner. In 1777 the 
Scottish bishops promised to take care of the ‘orphan’ 
survivors of the English non-jurors. But it fell to their 
lot to perform a more important work. In spite of 
repeated efforts made to obtain a bishop for America, 
the English Government had steadily refused its consent, 
with the result that the population was drifting into 
Methodism or indifference. In 1783, after the separa- 
tion of the United States from England, the clergy of 
Connecticut applied to the English bishops for the 
consecration of Dr, Samuel Seabury, who had been chaplain 
of an American regiment in the British service. The 
bishops felt unable to dispense with the oath of royal 
supremacy, which Seabury, as a citizen of an independent 
state, obviously could not take. In this dilemma, Dr. 
Seabury made an application to the Scottish bishops. 
An agreement was first made ‘between the Catholic 
remainder of the ancient Church of Scotland and the 
now rising Church of Connecticut.’ Then on Sunday, 
14th November 1784, Dr. Seabury was consecrated in 
an upper room in Bishop Skinner’s house in Aberdeen. 
He was heartily welcomed in America, where his devotion 
to Catholic truth and order were of inestimable service. 
He was vigorously opposed to the shallow scepticism which 
had begun to threaten the American Church, and he im- 
mediately tried to consolidate the Church’s organisation. 
He also induced the American Churchmen to accept the 
Scottish Communion Office as the basis of their own 
liturgy, and thus effected for the worship what he effected 
for the federation of the Church in America. 

In 1792 the penal laws against the Scots ministry were 
at last removed, but still they were not allowed to 
minister in England. From 1814 the State granted a 
small sum in support of the Episcopal clergy. This was 
withdrawn in 1856. 

Sad though the condition of the Scots Church was, she 
had preserved the teaching of the great divines of the 
seventeenth century, which had been almost forgotten 
in England. The reverence for antiquity preserved in 


84 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


Scotland, and represented by the greatest of her writers, 
was no doubt one of the causes which led Englishmen 
at length to consider the days of old and recover the 
teaching of the undivided Church. But there was a 
permanent influence in the English Church which tended 
in the same direction. The school of opinion which 
came to be called ‘high and dry,’ inherited the traditions 
of Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor and Ken. It needed 
only a breath of life to kindle the dry embers into flame. 
This was given by the rise of a new school at Oxford, at a 
time when attacks on the Church in Parliament were 
frequent, and when men of every shade of opinion feared 
that her endowments and position would soon be lost. 

Dr. Arnold, head-master of Rugby, to avoid the danger, 
proposed to admit all dissenters to the Church, all to 
require no assent to her distinctive teaching, and he 
thought in 1832 that ‘the Church as it now stands no 
human power can save.’ He was himself a great power 
as a teacher, and he represented the Latitudinarian (now 
called Broad Church) party, which was represented a 
century before by Tillotson and Burnet. But his was 
not the voice which was to recall the Church to duties 
she had neglected and doctrines she had ignored. 

A new movement began in 1833 in Oxford. It was 
led by John Keble, Fellow of Oriel, Edward Bouverie 
Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew and canon of Christ 
Church, and John Henry Newman, Fellow of Oriel and 
vicar of S. Mary’s. The issue of Tracts for the Times 
was the first step. No better description can be given of 
the work of the new Oxford school in reviving neglected 
teaching than in the words which have been used of Mr. 
Keble, whose influence, through his Christian Year, was 
perhaps the most widespread of the whole movement. 

‘His powerfully constructive mind,’ wrote Dr. Liddon 
(Life of Pusey, vol. i. p. 271), ‘grasped from the begin- 
ning the strength of the Anglican position as opposed to 
Protestantism and Rationalism, as well as to the yet 
unappreciated power of Romanism. He saw, as he stated 
in one of the earliest Tracts, that the Apostolical Suc- 
vession was the essential bond, recognised by sixteenth 
and seventeenth century divines, associating the English 


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 85 


Church, through Reformation and papal dominion, with 
that primitive Catholicism in which the Anglicans laid 
their foundations, and to which they had always appealed.’ 
The first aim of the Tractarians (as they came to be called) 
was to vindicate the belief of the Church in absolute 
religious truth. They raised a protest by their lives and 
by their writings against the shallow views which en- 
deavoured to take from religion all belief in the super- 
natural, and to discourage adherence to the ancient 
doctrinal standards and organisation of the Church. The 
Tracts were first of all directed against the indifferent, 
and secondly they were intended to represent the true 
teaching of the English Church ‘as opposed to Popish 
and Protestant dissent.’ 

The work of the Oxford movement linked itself to the 
teaching of the seventeenth century. In Scotland it was 
represented by Bishop Forbes, of Brechin, whose noble 
work, among many difficulties, will not be forgotten. 
In England, Keble and Newman and Pusey, Isaac 
Williams, Hugh James Rose, Walter Farquhar Hook, 
Richard William Church, and many others, ‘ were filled 
with a deep feeling of the importance and the wide con- 
sequence of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Catholic 
Church. It was this that linked them to the great 
English divines. It was this which gave the extraordi- 
nary motive force to the movement which they began. 
As conversion, assurance, and individuality were the 
powerful and appealing principles of the Evangelical 
revival, so the sense of inheritance and of communion in 
one historic body belonged to these Tractarians.’ 

The external history of the movement can be briefly 
told. It was bitterly opposed in Oxford; and as each 
doctrinal declaration of Mr. Newman or Dr. Pusey ap- 
peared, and was based on the teaching of the ancient 
fathers of the Church, it was denounced by those to 
whom it was unfamiliar as if it was alien to the teaching 
of the English Church. Treated by those in authority 
with strange harshness, Mr. Newman, the most beauti- 
ful and inspiring preacher of his age, gradually felt the 
ties which bound him to the National Church to be 
loosening, began to distrust her history and her doctrine, 


86 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


and finally passed over into the Church of Rome (1845). 
His secession was followed during the next eg ears 
by many others, the most important being that o j bee 
deacon Manning. But the main body of the Tractarians 
stood firm. The massive learning of Dr. Pusey, the 
poetic genius of Mr. Keble, the wide sympathies and 
wisdom of Dean Church, carried on the power of the 
movement to our own day. 

Religious energy revived on every side. Samuel Wil- 
berforce, bishop of Oxford, made the Episcopate a great 
force in the religion of the country. Missions were 
started, to awaken the careless. The religious life in 
communities was revived for women and for men with 
results of untold value. The Church reasserted her cor- 
porate life. Her Convocations again by royal licence 
resumed their sessions. Her missions all over the world 
increased beyond all expectation. Her bonds of union 
with the Church in the Colonies, in America, and in Scot- 
land became closer, and were strengthened by conferences 
of bishops at Lambeth, the last of which met in 1897. 

Through all this the wide comprehension of the Church 
was recognised. While some, living lives of eminent 
holiness and self-sacrifice, preached Christ as the Head 
of a divine society, revived Catholic usages which had 
been forgotten, and insisted on the observance of the 
rules of the Prayer Book in their integrity, includ- 
ing the rubric as to the ornaments of the church and 
of the minister, others upheld the Evangelical prin- 
ciples of personal responsibility and the free salvation 
of Christ, and others threw open the doors of the Church 
as widely as possible to admit any who in whatever sense 
called upon the name of the Lord Jesus. Historicall 
it is necessary to note the existence of these three schoo 
—of the Broad Church, with Arnold and Stanley and 
Jowett; of the Low Church, with Simeon and Melville 
and Villiers ; of the High Church, with Pusey and Keble 
and Hook. But the influence of each school was con- 
stantly commingled, as may be seen in the teaching of 
Maurice and Robertson and Kingsley and Church ; and 


the revival of spiritual energy in the Church was due to — 


the work, separate and combined, of all three. 


‘ 





THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 87 


The Church in England retains to-day her historic 
constitution and to a great extent her ancient geogra- 
phical arrangements. She is governed by the arch- 
bishops of Canterbury and York, and by thirty-three 
diocesan bishops, who are assisted by seventeen suffragan 
or assistant bishops. Under these are the arch- 
deacons, ninety in number, each bishopric being divided 
into archdeaconries, and each archdeaconry into rural 
deaneries, of which there are eight hundred and ten: 
the unit of ecclesiastical organisation is the parish, of 
which there are about fourteen thousand in England. 
Constitutionally the Church is an estate of the realm, whose 
bishops sit in the Upper House of Parliament (not all now 
sit ; since the increase of the Episcopate only twenty- 
four bishops besides the archbishops sit in the House of 
Lords), and whose members generally act through the two 
ancient Convocations of Canterbury and York. By rule, 
which has obtained at Teast since the time of Edward 1., 
if not from a much earlier date, the Convocations are 
composed of the archbishops and diocesan bishops, the 
deans and archdeacons, and two representatives from 
each cathedral chapter and from each diocese. The 
Convocations, with licence from the crown, may pass 
canons, which are binding on the clergy, but which need 
the sanction of Parliament to be binding on the laity. 

Geographically, the boundaries of the rural deaneries 
are the oldest surviving divisions of England, and the 
divisions of most of the dioceses belong to a period before 
the union of England under one crown. 

While the population has increased enormously in the 
present century, the income of the Church has diminished. 
In 1835 there were about 11,000 parishes, of which there 
were over 1600 worth less than £100 a year: now there 
are about 14,000, and in half of these the income of the 
incumbent is less than £130. In spite of the poverty of 
the clergy and the want of adequate endowments (for 
even the salaries of the bishops no more than suffice to 
pay the necessary demands of their positions), the amounts 
collected for philanthropic, educational, and missionary 
work reaches an immense sum annually. 

The Church of England has been the mother of Churches 


88 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


in America, in Australia, in the Colonies and De 

and beyond the limits of British conquest or influence. To 
the last conference of bishops in communion with her at 
Lambeth in 1897, no less than two hundred and forty- 
seven bishops were summoned. 

The Church in Scotland, in full communion with the 
English Church, stands in a different relation to the State. 
She is not nationally or officially recognised. Since the 
Revolution of 1688 Presbyterianism has been the estab- 
lished religion of that country. But the Episcopal body 
retains its hold on those who revere the ancient order, 
and increases its claims upon the love and devotion of 
the people. Her organisation is, in relation to the State, 
entirely voluntary, and the powers of the bishops and 
positions of the clergy are secured only as other corpora- 
tions are secured. In 1864 some of the last disabilities 
were removed by Parliament from the bishops and clergy. 
The Church has seven bishops, holding ancient sees, 
about three hundred and forty clergy, and the number 
of laity belonging to her communion is about a hundred 
and twenty thousand. 

Successful efforts have been made during the last fift 
years to increase the outward expression of Churc 
feeling and the sense of corporate life. In Scotland the 
laity have large powers over Church finance and assist 
freely in matters of organisation ; and the ee, and 
Provincial Synods have full authority over the Church. 
In England corporate life has shown itself in such 
gatherings as Diocesan Conferences and Church Con- 
gresses, through which the feeling of Churchmen on 
matters of religious and social interest is made known. 
Convocation, too, has resumed its sessions and watched 
over the progress of the Church. A House of laymen, 
representative of the different dioceses, has been added 
to the Convocation of each province. 

During the nineteenth century a series of Acts has 
been passed by Parliament opening the ancient univer- 
sities to dissenters from the Church, and allowi 
dissenting ministers and others to conduct Christian 
or orderly services in the churchyards. 

The law courts have from time to time been concerned 


a 


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 89 


with questions of doctrine and ritual, and a Public 
Worship Regulation Act was passed in 1874, which is 
generally regarded as an injudicious interference with 
the liberty of the Church. An enlarged freedom of 
self-government and a reconstituted system of ecclesias- 
tical courts are clearly the needs of the present day. 

Some such words as these, familiar though the facts are, 
seemed necessary to conclude these chapters, for there 
are many nowadays who are ignorant of the history of 
their fathers’ and grandfathers’ struggles for the Church. 
Of the grave dangers that still beset the Church nothing 
shall be said, for we read the past very faultily if we do 
not learn to trust implicitly in the providence of God. 
That the Church no longer even seems to exercise any op- 
pressive authority over the people, that all religious bodies 
are absolutely free from her control or from any restric- 
tion from the State, have been among the most important 
works of the century that is now ending. But most im- 
portant of all is the new life which has come into the 
Church through the guidance of bishops, the sacrifice of 
clergy, the devotion of religious, the loyalty of lay folk. 
When we look back over the centuries of Church history 
in our land, we may indeed thank God and take courage. 
The Scottish Church has advanced side by side with the 
English, and they confront the difficulties of the future 
with cordial union. 


GLOSSARY 


Anglican, the term used to distinguish the Church in England 
from other branches of the Catholie Church. The Church is 
thus described in Magna Carta (Ecclesia Anglicana libera sit). 
The expression is now often used of the Western Churches, © 
and those springing from them, which are not in communion 
with Rome. 


Annates, or the first year’s income of bishoprics and other benefices. 
To these the popes from the thirteenth century gradually 
laid claim. In 1532 they were transferred by Act of Parlia- 
ment to the crown. Queen Anne finally gave them up for 
Church purposes. 


Bernard, the greatest of the Cistercian order (founded 1098). 
He was born in 1091, and founded the abbey of Clairvaux, 
from which he exercised, through his holy life, learning, and 
zeal, an extraordinary influence over the whole Church. 


Brythons, a Celtic race which invaded our island after the 
Goidels and gradually conquered nearly the whole land. 


Calvin, John, a great French reformer of the sixteenth century 
who settled at Geneva and established a system of doctrine 
and discipline which was accepted by large bodies of Protest- 
ants on the Continent. The Calvinists denied that the 
Sacraments are effectual signs of grace, rejected Episcopacy, 
and taught that God does not grant saving grace to all men, 
even if they desire it. 


Catholic, universal. The Catholic Church is that which retains 
the three orders of bishops, priests, and deacons which have 
been in the Church since the ee = time, and adheres to 
‘the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints’ 
(J = 3). 


GLOSSARY 91 


Culdees, a monastic order coming originally from Ireland and 
having many houses in Scotland. They afterwards aban- 
doned their strict rules and adopted those of the secular 


clergy. 


Gildas, a British monk who wrote in the sixth century an account 
of the miseries of his people. 


Goidels, a Celtic tribe which invaded our island, conquered its 
old non-Aryan inhabitants, and was gradually driven to the 
west by the Brythons. 


Gregory L, pope 590-604. Great as a theologian, statesman, and 
organiser of the Papal State on the ruins of the Roman 
Empire. 


Ignatius, Saint, bishop of Antioch, suffered martyrdom about 
A.D. 110. His epistles nobly describe the Person of our Lord 
and the organisation of the Church. 


Jesuits, a society founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534. It 
devoted itself to the deepening of spiritual life and the 
recovery of the lands which had cast off the papal power. 
The Jesuits have generally advocated the most extreme form 
of Romanism. 


Lutheranism, named after Martin Luther, the founder of German 
Protestantism. Lutheranism taught a perverted form of 8. 
Paul’s doctrine of justification, rejected genuine bishops, and 
denied that Christ ought to be worshipped in the Sacrament, 
though it held that He is really present in the Sacrament 
during the Communion. 


Mass, a name which began to be applied to the ‘Order of the 
Administration of the Lord’s Supper’ in Western Europe 
about the end of the fourth century. The word originally 
meant the solemn ‘dismissal’ of worshippers at this service, 
and was then given to the service from which they were 
dismissed. The more primitive name for the service is 
Eucharist, which means ‘thanksgiving.’ 


Mortmain, the holding land in dead hamd, 1.e. by corporations, 
ecclesiastical or other, which are not liable to feudal military 
dues or succession duties. A statute was passed against 
holding land in mortmain in 1279. 


Non-~ jurors, those who would not swear allegiance to any other 
sovereign than those of the house of Stewart, especially in the 
times of William m1. -, George 1, and George m. The non- 
jurors included many devout Churchmen in England and 
almost all the Scottish Episcopalians, 


92 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


Origen, died a.p. 254. A great Christian writer of Alexandria, 
who tried to combine all that was good in Greek philosophy 
with Christianity. 


Ornaments rubric, the rubric printed in the Book of Common 
Prayer before the Morning Prayer. It directs the use of 
such ornaments of the Church and Ministers (e.g. lights and 
vestments) as were used by the authority of Parliament in 
the second year of King Edward v1. 


Praemunire.—A statute passed in 1353-1355 against papal juris- 
diction in England. 


Presbyterianism, a system of Church government which maintains 
that a presbyter or priest is the equal of a bishop, and that 
the presbyters.therefore form the highest order of the eae 
The various Presbyterian denominations are built upon the 
doctrines of Calvin. ; 


Provisors.—A statute passed in 1351 against papal provisions 
(i.e. appointments to English benefices). 


Tertullian, died about a.p. 221. A powerful Christian writer 
who wrote in Latin against paganism and heresy. He 
deserted the Catholic Church and became a member of the 
Montanist sect. 


Transubstantiation is the word used by Roman Catholics to 
describe the doctrine of the Real Presence of our Lord in the 
Sacrament of His body and blood. For several centuries 
the Church used no phrase to describe the manner of Christ’s 
presence. The Church was content to yd that the bread 
and wine become the body and blood of Christ through the 

ower of the Holy Ghost and of our Lord, who is the divine 
ord ‘by whom all things were made.’ The union of the 
bread and wine with the body and blood of Christ was some- 
times compared with the union existing between His man- 
hood and His Godhead. In the twelfth century an attempt 
was made to define the manner of Christ’s presence on the 
lines of the philosophy then popular. It was thought that 
everything consists of substance and accidents. The accidents 
were thought to be that part of a thing which we can see and 
touch. The substance was thought to be a mysterious 
something which exists behind anything that we can see and 
touch, and which makes a thing to be what it is. It was 
therefore said that after consecration the accidents of bread 
and wine (such as size and taste) remain, and that the 
substance of the bread and wine was replaced by the 
mysterious spiritual substance of the body and blood of 
Christ. 


GLOSSARY 93 


The fourth Lateran Council, held at Rome in 1215, accepted 
this theory and said that the bread and wine are transub- 
stantiated into the body and blood of Christ. This theory 
was put into a very superstitious form not only by the 
ignorant but by many of the clergy. They thought that the 
presence of Christ was material rather than spiritual. This error 
was partly caused by Pope Nicholas m., who induced Beren- 
garius to say that the body of Christ was present ‘sensually, 
and ground by the teeth of the faithful. This doctrine was 
taught in one of its worst forms in England, as is shown by a 
statement of Archbishop Arundel in 1413. He asserted that 
the material bread was changed into Christ’s body, as if even 
the ‘accidents’ of the bread disappeared at consecration. It 
is plain that this theory is both opposed to the teaching of 
the early Church and overthrows the nature of the Sacrament 
by denying all reality to the outward forms of bread and 
wine. 

The Roman Catholic Council of Trent in 1551 again, in 
very strong words, affirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation, 
but without either definitely sanctioning or disallowing the 
superstitious and materialistic view which had been current 
in some quarters during the Middle Ages. 


A SHORT CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF EVENTS 
IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH 
IN GREAT BRITAIN 


A.D. PAGE 
7304 Martyrdom of S. Alban, E iW - 3 
2390 Mission of S. Ninian, . ‘ 3 ‘ ¢ 
409 Heresy of Pelagius, . : 4 = * 
430 Alleluia Victory, 3 2 : < 
2473 Invasion of the English and saute | . 
563 Mission of 8. Columba, S : ‘ r 
597 Mission of 8. Augustine, 4 = - ‘ 
603 Conference with British Bishops, . A $ 
604 Death of S. Augustine, ; : - 
627 Baptism of Eadwine by Paulinus, . . * 
634 Mission of 8. Birinus to Wessex, . E . 
635 Mission of 8. Aidan in Northumbria, E é 
664 Synod of Whitby, t 3 - ‘ . 
668 Consecration of Theodore of Tarsus, { Pet pages 
673 Council of Hertford, . 4 

678 Expulsion of Wilfrith, . 2 : a Yeu 
685 Episcopate of S. Cuthbert, . “ < 
690 Death of Archbishop Theodore, 3 < o 
709 Death of Wilfrith, * , : fs : 
735 Ecgberht, first Arehbishop of York, . ‘ ‘ 
735 Death of Bede,. ° » . . ° 


94 


a a 
BR SFeh owner araannan eh OH OD 


A.D. 
TA7 
787 
794 
855 
870 
878 
899 
959 

1011 

1027 

1042 

1070 

1093 

1110 

1135 

1154 

1164 

1170 

1189 

1215 


“CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 


Council of Cloveshoo, 
Archbishopric of Lichfield, . 
Danish Invasion, 3 = 
Ethelwulf’s Law on Tithes, 
Martyrdom of 8. Edmund, 
Peace of Wedmore, . s 
Death of Alfred, Ee s 
Archbishoprie of 8. Dunstan, 
Murder of S. Alphege, 
Canute’s Visit to Rome, 
Accession of Edward the Confessor, 
Consecration of Lanfranc, 
Consecration of 8. Anselm, 


Murder of S. Magnus, 


Stephen’s Charter, . : 
Accession of Henry u., : 
Constitutions of Clarendon, A 


Murder of 8S. Thomas of Canterbury, 
Archbishop Baldwin’s Mission in Wales, 
Magna Carta, 


1220-24 The Coming of the Friars, . 


Death of Robert Grosseteste, 


Little 8. Hugh, = ; 

Battle of Evesham, . 

Statute of Mortmain, 2 a 
Statute of Carlisle, . : a : 
The Black Death, . ; 4 - 
Statute of Provisors, = “ F 
Death of Wyclif, - > é e 


95 


PAGE 


96 THE CHURCH IN GREAT BRITAIN 


A.D. 
1393 
1401 
1457 
1472 
1486 
1492 
1524 
1529 
1531 


Second Statute of Praemunire, . 
Statute de haeretico comburendo, 
Condemnation of Bishop Pecock, . 
Archbishopric of S. Andrews, 
Cardinal Morton, Archbishop, 
Archbishopric of Glasgow, . 

The Divorce Question, 

The Reformation Parliament, r 
Royal Supremacy Ratified, . . 
Annates to Rome abolished, . 


Declaration of Nullity of Henry v's Marriage, 


Abolition of Appeals to Rome, . 


Suppression of Lesser Monasteries, 


The Ten Articles, . s : 
Suppression of Greater Monasteries, 
The Six Articles, = 7 : 


First Prayer Book of Edward vr., 
Second Prayer Book, 

Reunion with Rome, a 
Burning of Ridley and Latimer, 
Burning of Cranmer, F 
Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy, 
Consecration of Parker, ; 
Abolition of the Scots Episcopate, . 
Excommunication of Elizabeth, 
The English Thirty-nine Articles, . 
Coming of the Jesuits, 

The Spanish Armada, : 


Establishment of Presbyterianism in Scotland, 


PAG 


BRAETRSERSSTCRRSER ER EE SEERRPRBGSRE 


CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 


Publication of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, 
Accession of James r., 


Consecration of the three Scots Bishops, 


Assembly of Perth, . : ¢ 
Hampton Court Conference, . : 

Issue of the Authorised Version, - “ 
The Scots Rebellion, 


Abolition of Established easter: in England, 
Execution of Archbishop Laud, 
Execution of Charles 1., 

Restoration of Church and King, 
Savoy Conference, 

Act of Uniformity, 

Scots Rescissory Act, 

Issue of Revised Prayer Book, 

The Test Act, : 
Murder of Archbishop Sharp, 

Trial of the Seven Bishops, . “ 
Abolition of Episcopacy in Scotland, 


Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge founded, 


Society for Propagation of Gospel begun, 
Queen Anne gave the Tenths and First-fruits, 
Sacheverell’s Trial, 

Beginning of Methodism, 

Publication of Butler’s Analogy, 

Consecration of Bishop Seabury, 

Death of John Wesley, 3 

The Oxford Movement, 

Revival of Convocations, 


G 


97 

PAGE 
58 
62 
60 
61 
62 
63 
65 
65 
66 
66 
67 
67 
69 
71 
68 
70 


INDEX OF NAMES OF PERSONS 


ZETHELBERHT, King, 5. 
Aidan, S., 6, 7, 11. 
Alban, S., 2. 

Alfred, King, 15. 
Alphege, S., 16. 
Andrewes, Bishop, 62. 
Anne, Queen, 74, 75. 
Anselm, 20, 21, 22. 
Arles, Council of, 2. 
Arnold, Dr., 84. 
Augustine, S., 5. 


BALDWIN, Archbishop, 29. 
Beaton, Cardinal, 45. 
Becket, Thomas, 26, 27, 31. 
Bede, 7, 12, 13. 

Bernard, S., 24, 25. 
Burnet, Bishop, 24. 

Butler, Bishop, 79. 


CANUTE, King, 16. 
Chad, S., 8. 
Colman, 7. 
Columba, S., 4. 
Columbanus, S., 4. 


Cranmer, Archbishop, 42, 43; 49 | 


si. 
Cromwell, Oliver, 66. 


Cromwell, Thomas, 44. 
98 


Culdees, 15. 
Cuthbert, S., 7, 1. 


DAVID, King, 21, 22. 
David, S., 4. 
Dominicans, 31. 


EDMUND, King, 15. 

Edward, Confessor, 16, 17, 21. 
Edward I., 33, 34- 

Edward VI., 48, 49, 50, 51. 
Elbod, Bishop, 14. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57- 


FORBES, Bishop, 85. 
Franciscans, 31. 


GERMANUS, S., 3. 
Gregory, S., 5. 
Grosseteste, Bishop, 32. 


HENRY I., 21, 22, 23. 

Henry I1., 26, 27, 28, 29. 

Henry vVil., 38, 39, 49, 41. 

Henry VIII., 39, 40, 41, 42, 43) 44 
45, 48, 49, 51, 53- 

Herbert, George, 63. 

Hilda, S., 11. 

Hoadly, Bishop, 78. 

Hugh, Bishop and Saint, 30. 

Hugh, LitdleS., 33- 


INDEX OF NAMES OF PERSONS 


JAMES I. and VI., 59, 60, 61, 62, 
63. ; 

James 1. and VII., 71. 

Jane, Queen, 51. 

Juxon, Archbishop, 67. 


KEBLE, John, 84, 85, 86. 
Ken, Bishop, 71, 73, 84. 
Kitchin, Bishop, 48. 

Knox, John, 45, 46, 47, 49. 


LANFRANC, 18, 19, 20. 

Langton, Stephen, 30, 31. 
Latimer, Bishop, 51, 52. 

Laud, Archbishop, 63, 64, 65, 66, 


67. 
Leighton, Archbishop, 72. 
Luther, Martin, 41, 44. 


MARY I., Queen, 51, 52. 


Mary i., Queen, 73. 
Mary of Scotland, Queen, 45, 47, 


59- 
Milton, John, 67. 
Montfort, Simon de, 32, 33. 
Morton, Archbishop, 38, 39, 41. 


NeEwMaAv, Dr. J. H., 84, 85, 86. 
Ninian, S., 3. 


OSWALD, King, 6, to. 
Oswiu, King, 7, 10. 


99 


PARKER, Archbishop, 53; 54) 55+ 
Pusey, Dr. E. B., 84, 85, 86. 


RATTRAY, Bishop, 78. 
Ridley, Bishop, 51, 52. 


SACHEVERELL, Dr., 75. 
Sancroft, Archbishop, 71, 73- 
Seabury, Bishop, 83. 

Sharp, Archbishop, 71, 72. 
Skinner, Bishop, 83. 


TAYLOR, Bishop Jeremy, 74, 84. 
Theodore, Archbishop, 9. 
Tillotson, Archbishop, 73. 


WaruHA\M, Archbishop, 39, 40. 
Wesley, Charles, 79, 80. 
Wesley, John, 79, 80, 8r. 
Whitby, Synod of, 7, 8. 
Whitefield, George, 79, 80. 
Whitgift, Archbishop, 57, 62. 
Wilberforce, Samuel, 86. 
Wilberforce, William, 82. 
Wilfrith, S., 8, 9, ro. 
William I., 17, 18, 19, 20. 
William I1!., 71, 73, 74- 
Willibrod, S., 12. 
Winchester, Henry of 24, 25. 
Winfrid, S., 12, 13. 

Wolsey, Thomas, 38, 39, 40. 
Wulfstan, 20. 

Wyclif, John, 34, 35, 36. 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE CHURCH 
IN GREAT BRITAIN. 
Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. 


‘Is written with full knowledge, proper proportion, and wise com- 
pression.'—English Historical Review. 

‘No one is more fitted to write such a book. . . . It is interesting, 
accurate, and for its size, very full of matter.'—Literature. : 

‘Mr. Hutton has written a good book.'—Spectator. - 

‘The very book for which many have been looking—comprehensive, 
lucid, and fair.’"—S?t. James's Gazette. 

“We have been surprised to find how much Mr. Hutton tells in his few 
pages, and attribute his success to a keen sense for the essential, and a 
terse, yet easy style.'—Pad/ Mall Gazette. 

‘We have found his book thoroughly readable, and, no doubt, it will be 
widely read.’—Sfeaker. 

‘It is a clear and interesting summary of the facts that make up the story 
of the Anglican Church, which cannot but prove useful to students and 


teachers of its subject as an introduction to the heavier histories.’— 
Scotsman. 

‘This is a useful as well as attractive little book. From inning to 
end it is careful, accurate, and well thought out.’"—Manchester (an. 


‘To tell the history of the Church in this island from the martyrdom of 
St. Alban to the accession of Archbishop Temple in 283 pages is no mean 
See Mr. Hutton has done this,*and done it '—Saturday 

eview. 


THE ENGLISH REFORMATION. 
With a Preface on the Archbishop’s recent decision. 
Crown 8vo. Is. 


ConTENTS.—The National Church as a Bond of Union—I. What was 
the Reformation?—Its History, Henry vit. to Charles u.—Its eo 
II. Did it break the Continuity of the Church?—(x) Legally and His- 
torically ; (2) Doctrine and Discipline, Theologically—The Jurisdiction of 
the Pope—The Royal Supremacy—The Holy Communion—Holy Orders 
—What is Continuity of Doctrine?—Public Discipline—Private Disci- 
pline—Fasting—Confession. 


‘An admirable lecture . . . its purpose to present a concise defence of 
the claim of the Church of England to continuity.'—Guardian. 

‘He has succeeded more than many others who have lectured on the 
Reformation in adhering closely to the real question at issue.’—Church 
Quarterly Review. ey 

‘The lecture is important, as it has been severely criticised by Roman 
Catholic writers. Mr. Hutton does not profess to say anything new upon 
the subject, but what he does say is thoroughly to the point.—Ang/o- 
Catholic. 

‘Written in an admirable spirit.’ Saturday Review. 

‘It puts its argument with excellent terseness and firmness.’—Scotsman. 

* He is fair-minded and moderate in his views.'— Western Morning News. 


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